Yesterday I watched A Few Good Men again and it kind of caught me by surprise to realize it is now 19 years since the movie was first released. It got me to thinking about the way life passes by seemingly with increasing velocity.
My reflection took me back to a summer afternoon in North Carolina 1983. We had been to the beach with the Skeltons, close family friends. On the way back we kids rode in the back of a pickup truck and enjoyed the thrill of warm wind rushing past us as we sped along the roads and highways. And for some reason my mind latched onto the concern that it was taking me entirely too long to grow up. When you're twelve years old it takes forever to become thirteen.
So today I did a little math. If you dismiss the first three years of my life as being irrelevant because I can hardly remember them... then at age twelve, a year constituted about 11% of my life. But now at age 40 a year constitutes about 3% of my life. That's why a year seems so long when you're a kid and so short when you're an adult. In 1983 I could remember celebrating eight birthdays.... now I've forgotten about 20 or 25 of them.
How many times has someone told me they've been married for 40 years and I've exclaimed, "Wow, I haven't even been alive that long!" Not so anymore. Now I have been alive that long. I now have a fairly decent grasp on how much time must elapse for 40 years of life to be recorded.
So on I walked pondering life and the rapidity of its consumption, as it were. And I asked myself... should I be driving instead? I mean if life is so short... I could get where I'm going much sooner if I drove. But that begs the question what is more important... my destination? Or the manner in which I get there? Because today I was going to my favorite Thai restaurant in order to devour some tasty fried rice with tofu and to read from a couple books, Ulysses and Outlander, but it was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy it... so I went on foot.
I wonder if I'll eventually reach the point where I panic so much about the limitations to life, that I'll actually drive more often and walk less so as to save time. Preserving more time to do whatever I plan to do when I get wherever I'm going. And it occurs to me I might ought to upgrade the things I'm planning to do at the other end of my traversings. Beftter to write a book when I get there than to read one.
