Time Flies 1/7/09

While web surfing on New Year’s Day I came across an interesting video entitled “One Year in 40 Seconds”. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a video of time lapse photography showing a wooded area changing through a year’s worth of seasons in just forty seconds. Finding this video on New Year’s Day struck me as ironic because just the night before, as my family and I sat glued to the New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon, I thought to myself, “Wasn’t it just yesterday we celebrated New Year’s Eve 2007?”

As a child, time seemed to crawl along at a snail’s pace. Waiting for my mother at the fabric store seemed like forever. Church was an eternity. It seemed like my next birthday or Christmas or summer vacation would never arrive. When would I finally be tall enough to ride the Zipper? Old enough to get my driver’s license? Mature enough to be considered an adult? (Okay, I’m still waiting for that last one.)

Then suddenly time sped up. Four years of college passed in a flash. My first real job was just a blink of an eye, followed quickly by my second and third. Before I knew it, I was thirty with a steady boyfriend and an eye towards marriage. When my children were born, other mothers warned me to enjoy every moment of their babyhood and not to wish away that time. Struggling with the everyday challenges of being a stay-at-home mother, I couldn’t help but wish for my children to grow up just a little bit faster, be a little more independent, a little less needy.

And now the “babies” are seven and ten. And while I’m thankfully finished with strollers, diaper bags and pack-n-plays, I’m starting to worry about braces and learner’s permits and college tuition. My “milestone” 40th birthday was five years ago, and the next milestone will be here long before I’m ready (okay, I’ll never really be ready.)

I think time is moving faster now because there’s less of it ahead of me. Yes, that sounds morbid, but facts are facts. As a child, a teenager and even a young adult, it was easy to be impatient for everything that lay ahead because there was so much more time stretching ahead of me. When I was younger, I was less likely to appreciate the “here and now”, focusing more on the “what’s next?” Perhaps you have to be older to understand that the cliché “Every day is a gift” really isn’t a cliché at all. I’ll try to impress this upon my children but it may take another few decades before they can fully understand this concept.

That’s all right. I can wait.