The River of Life

The more we live, more brief appear

     Our life’s succeeding stages:

A day to childhood seems a year,

     And years like passing ages.

 

The gladsome current of our youth,

     Ere passion yet disorders,

Steals lingering like a river smooth

     Along its grassy borders.

 

But as the careworn cheek grows wan,

     And sorrow’s shafts fly thicker,

Ye Stars, that measure life to man,

     Why seem your courses quicker?

 

When joys have lost their bloom and breath

     And life itself is vapid,

Why, as we reach the Falls of Death,

     Feel we its tide more rapid?

 

It may be strange—yet who would change

     Time’s course to slower speeding,

When one by one our friends have gone

     And left our bosoms bleeding?

 

Heaven gives our years of fading strength

     Indemnifying fleetness;

And those of youth, a seeming length,

     Proportion’d to their sweetness.

--Thomas Campbell--

I love the above poem.  Mr. Campbell tells it like it is.  The passage of time speeds up as you grow older...or so it seems that way to me.  Life appears to be passing me by at breakneck speed, one day passing into another, becoming a blur as weeks, months, years all seem to meld together into a blur.  I was reading something awhile ago that says time itself does not speed up, it is the way we look at things.   It all has to do with anticipation and retrospection. When we are children, we have our whole life is ahead of us, so it seems slow.  Summer vacations appeared to go on forever.  When we were young, everything every experience we have is  new experience.   But I have realized as I have grown older and experiences tend to repeat themselves, time is moving ever so much faster.  

When we are anticipating new experiences--our first love, our first heartbreak, landing a job, marriage, having children--each new  event seems to be excruciatingly far away.   Then, after they happen, we look back at them.  "Did it really happen that long ago?"  we exclaim.  And so it is that when we are looking forward, all of our milestones seemed so impossibly far in the future, but once we have achieved them, they quickly  receded into the past.  And so it is, the older we get, the more milestones we have to look back upon, and the farther and faster they seem to recede. Hence, the speeding up of time.

Society is not much help either.  In today's world, everything is rush, rush. Cars drive too fast. People walk too fast. Food even seems to cook too fast Even holidays.  I was rather unpleasantly surprised last week when I went into the store to get hubby a birthday card, and Halloween cards were out already.  It's only early August.  Before you know it, they'll be springing  Christmas upon us. Come on now.  Let us enjoy what we can of the seasons.  I don't know about you, but I am really not ready for it.

Have a great day...and stay dry.

 

The days they pass so quickly now;
Nights are seldom long.
Time around me whispers when it's cold.
Changes somehow frighten me;
Still I have to smile.
It turns me on to think of growing old.

(Poems, Prayers, and Promises by John Denver)