David – Losing Time
“One day you wake up and you say ‘Where did 20 years go?'”
This is David, describing losing time.
I remember being really small and hearing older people talk about, “Oh, it goes by so fast” when you are ten years old you think “My god, it feels like I’ve been ten for like five years, it is not going very fast. The hardest part is to try to figure out where was this, where was this transition to these long years of youth that seemed endless to you are on the downward slide and everything is so fast. From age 5 until I got out of high school, just, it seemed like it was an eternity. It was like sitting in line, or sitting in traffic, just waiting, where five minutes seems like you are there for hours and hours. And that is what it was like, so like the last three years have just gone by in the blink of an eye, where did go, what did I do different? I even notice day to day things that don’t seem to take as long as they did thirty years ago.
Probably like late teens, once you are given a sense of responsibility in life, you know that whatever dreams and plans you think you have as you go through, you look at like “Well, I’m still working on getting there”, but then one day you wake up and it is like “Wow, I’m almost forty, where did the last twenty years go? Where did this go? Why am I not doing the things I thought I would be doing?”
You think you have all of this time, but then you realize “I don’t have that much time.” It is something that you lose a little bit more of everyday, if I’m just sitting at home watching TV or just reading, I’m like “What am I doing? I’m sitting here, I’ve had twelve hours of absolutely nothing accomplished.” And there is yet another day gone.
It is moving at the same speed for everybody, whether you are standing on the corner panhandling or you are on a different continent everyday. It is moving at the same speed. Sometimes it is hard to think about… you know, I have, hopefully, another forty years left, but maybe not. Starting now, I’m not going to worry about having a strict plan that I need to follow, maybe, just taking one day at a time and doing what I want to do, not worrying about having the 401k and having all the money saved up because two years from now it may not matter, maybe it is all gone, maybe I’m not here two years from now. So it is all about just doing what I want to do and enjoying what the time that I have, so that I don’t lose anymore of it.
Losing Something by Jody Stephens is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.