Around the clock

Time is so relevant and so sensitive.

The world took forever when I was a child.  Nights were infinite, days long and full of adventures.   I thought we went to school half the year and had summer the other half!

My world pretty much stayed that way until I had children.  Oh, I knew summer wasn’t six months long, but I managed to play tennis from April to October most years so it didn’t matter what it was called.

My daughter was my first child.  She was nearly four when she came to live with us and started school the next year.  I remember thinking that things would slow down once school started and I could get back into my old routines of ambling through life playing.

I didn’t realize I had just stepped out of the gate and begun the great race!  Maybe it was my first tentative step out of childhood into the adult world.  I’m not sure about that, because I’m still hanging onto the line that attaches me to my toys.  It doesn’t seem to be slowing me down any though.

I am retired!  How can that be? 

Years slip by faster than the nights when I was three!  Decades pass more quickly than my first semester of first grade! 

I still dream the same dreams, still love most of the same things, still want many of the same basics and honestly am often as overwhelmed as I ever was by the diversity and magnificence and joy that swirls around me in any given moment.

I’m taller and have a sixty-year head start, but other than that I can relate to the children in this world so easily because we still have a lot in common.  It’s just that my battery is running down now, but the clock works in our minds and hearts are closer than you might think.