Passing Time
One of my friends tweeted yesterday that she had to explain who Rerun, Tattoo (de plane, de plane), J.R. Ewing, The Fonz, Gilligan, and Laverne and Shirley were to a young PR executive .
I laughed having just sent my 16-year-old daughter off to see Beauty and the Beast at the movie theater.
“Didn’t I take you to see that when it first came out?” I asked her.
“Mom, I wasn’t even born yet!” was her exasperated reply.
She was right. The original release of Beauty and the Beast was in November of 1991. The only one of my five children who was alive at that point was my son.
It must’ve been him that we had taken. But maybe not, since I distinctly remember that the first movie we had taken him to see was Aladdin, which was released in 1992. Now he’s graduating from college.
I’m taking him to London for his graduation present. I often tell my children about my trip to London when I ate jack potatoes in pubs for dinner and went to Oxford to visit a friend for high tea and scones. That only seemed like yesterday for me until I started planning this trip with my son and realized that it was actually 25 years ago.
How did that time fly by so quickly?
My friends’ children are getting married. My brother is becoming a grandfather. My own children have grown out of the "Leave me alone..." phase and seem to be returning to the toddler stage of "I WANT...," be it my attention, my time or my hugs.
Some of my friends are working with their therapists on how to manage their adult children, and others are caught between the two worlds of running to help their parents when they are ill and then flying back home to take care of their teenage children.
Life moves so quickly. “Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend,” wrote the Greek philosopher, Theophrastus.
So why is it so challenging for so many of us to live in the present and just be still and enjoy the moments as they happen? Time will pass in spite of our stillness, but perhaps we will better understand its value in our lives.