After a brief sabbatical, we are back and getting into some sort of grind. Between wedding plans, house renovations, a new job, and all the various holidays, time just slipped away.
Time is an interesting thing. It's actually a pretty controversial subject, because no one can adequately define it. I think of it as being more of a theory than anything else. It's everything, yet it's nothing. It is absolute and it is abstract.
Remember when we were kids? Time moved so incredibly slowly, it was almost as if it were moving backwards. I don't think I was a terrible child, but I do know I was a mischievous one (I know, difficult to believe). I remember on more than one occasion being told that I needed to sit still in a chair for five minutes. This was my parents' rendition of time-out, I suppose. I still can remember the angst I felt when I had to sit still and not do anything for five whole minutes! I would watch this enormous clock tick so slowly, I was sure the batteries were dying mid-stroke.
Today, five minutes come and go and I feel as if I didn't even have time to blink an eye. My little siblings are all growing up. I will always think of my brother as that 7-year-old kid that I left when I went off to college. And my baby sister? She's going to high school next school year. We can start this whole new game called "You know you're old when...". I may still have that youthful face, but my hair is turning a lighter shade that is definitely not intentional (nor is it invited!), and my body sometimes doesn't want to work the way I want it to.
What is it about time that changes as we age? You would think that the two have to have a linear relationship, since we age as time goes on. It's inevitable, it's nature. So why aren't they linear? If anything, time seems parabolic, doesn't it? As children, there's a lot of time and little to do. As adults, there's a lot to do and little time to do it in. And from what I understand, as elders, there is yet again more time and less to do.
Perhaps it's that time is also a concept. As a child, school years took forever, and birthdays and holidays seemed to slowly creep in. As adults, we try to squeeze so much into our lives, possibly to "fulfill" our lives, that we fill them too much. Either everything gets neglected, or nothing gets done. Most people just don't have the time to keep up with everything they pile on their plate. So we do a lot of compromising. We'll make poor attempts at chores this weekend, but at least we'll have a couple of hours to visit the family and then we can probably squeeze in dinner with some friends before we need to get back home so we can get to bed at a decent hour so we can be up to do some yard work before it gets dark and cold. Oh, and we have to get laundry done somewhere in there, and we need to go grocery shopping because we have no food in the fridge and only a few slices of bread in the pantry. See? We don't even have time to be grammatically correct in our thinking. It's just one big run-on sentence. Maybe we get a chance to stop and pause for a breath. Then again...maybe not.
What happened to those days where I was so bored, I'd go outside and play for hours, just to keep my mind occupied? Now I don't even have the energy to occupy the nephews for more than a couple minutes at a time. I wish for those little tidbits of time where I don't have to do ANYTHING. Do we use up every ounce of our energy as children, as if it were a reservoir that eventually will be empty once we reach adulthood? Or is it because we just don't have as many responsibilities, so our energy is never fully tapped? Does this mean that responsibility and time are related? I mean, they do say that "with time comes responsibility". Or is it that with AGE comes responsibility? Then again, in my mind, they should be interchangeable, so it's both.
For those of us who never seem to have the time to do much, let's play hooky for the day. Take a trip to the beach, take a trip to the mountains, or take a trip to the park. Personally, I would take a drive with my better half. The perfect day-trip would be down to Rehoboth Beach, whether it be during the winter or during the summer. There's always something open, no matter what time of the year it is. A good place for karaoke is the Purple Parrot. I have never been disappointed by the entertainment there. Dos Locos, in my opinion, is the best place to get some food and a beverage or two. If you're looking to shake your booty (as I usually am), even during the winter you can find at least one place where the music is pumping and the bodies are jumping. If you are not in the area to make a day-trip to Rehoboth, look around you. What's within a two-hour radius? How far are you willing to travel? Grab your loved ones, grab your keys, and get away!
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