Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S.Eliot – Burnt Norton
Ten years ago, for the whole of 2012, I made a song and dance about being 50. Neither a singer nor a dancer, I embarked on a project which involved doing 50 different, interesting and new things. I wasn’t sure what it was all about, but I kept going. I talked about my project and my age, a lot, and I blogged. You can find those blog posts in the ‘2012 – A Year to Celebrate’ category on this website. More on this project and what it taught me another day.
Threescore. The old fashioned way of saying sixty. I decided to embrace and celebrate 50 and it worked out well. Sixty, however, is a different number. A different notch on the scale altogether. Add ‘and ten’ and you have a reasonable lifespan. Add a few years and some of us are thinking of retirement. Some of my classmates from school have already retired. And this very year I will soon qualify for free NHS prescriptions and eye tests.
Sixty feels like many years, so many memories. Much more behind me than yet to come. I wonder whether, like Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, ‘… time (having no further use for me) is running out.’ Scary thought. Best replaced quickly with some mundane concern.
The truth is, I haven’t started yet. I used to say that I was still wondering what I would do when I grew up. Happily, so happily, I no longer need to say that. The ‘side-line’ I enjoyed when practising law has become my main occupation and I am continually amazed that I talk about Shakespeare, poetry, language, grammar and spelling (and everything else you could possibly cram into the category ‘English) for work. I have finally landed in my ideal workplace.
But there is still so much to do. Books to write, places to go, languages to learn. The more decades, years, months, weeks and days I trail behind me, the more precious every moment becomes. And the less energy I have to fill those moments with action.
I suppose we have to waste a lot of time before we learn to value it. Spend eons in the past and the future before we realise that the present moment is all that exists.
Time. Constantly on my mind. The more urgent my need to understand it, the more baffling it becomes.
