Time Marches On

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Anniversaries are always bittersweet and I’m coming up on a rather big one.  I like the solid quality of an anniversary.  There’s something comforting about being able to put one foot in front of the other and mark off significant days along the way.  The death of a loved one’s anniversary passes and you realize that time is healing, even if it’s sad that memory fades along the way.  When you mark a happy occasion such as a birthday or wedding anniversary, then you’re always glad that you counted the time because it’s surprising how fast it all sped by and how much you accomplished along the way. 

What I don’t like about marking anniversaries is the way that I’m painfully reminded how fast time marches along and how quickly all of this will be over.  It’s like the song, “100 years”, says “I’m fifteen for a moment.”  Then I’m twenty for a moment and thirty-five for a moment and forty for a moment.  But no matter where I am in my life, I’m only there for a moment.  Any parent realizes this when you look at a photo album of your children growing and you marvel at how it feels like just yesterday that they were small.  Time, it’s the one thing we all have in common and it’s often out of our control.

When my husband approaches a birthday, he’s always disappointed.  He looks back on the passing years as opportunities missed and goals not met.  But I really only think these feelings hit us once we have quite a few years under our belts.  When we’re young we feel like we have time for absolutely anything.  We can gaze at stars and watch a worm inch its way across a sidewalk.  We know that we have time to recover from our mistakes so we’re more open to taking chances. 

This anniversary I plan to go about my day like I’m still young.  I’m not going to reflect on what I have or haven’t done I’m just going to live.  I’m going to hold my daughter on my lap while she talks in circles about her favorite toys and I’m going to listen to my teenager’s recounting of great general’s battles in history without wishing I was somewhere else, getting something like laundry done.  And I’m going to kiss my husband like when we were dating because I remember that it was fun back when.