It’s Sunday morning, 5:16. I just woke up, in more ways than one.
I am almost sixty years old. I have not been one of those people who embrace their maturity. I have been dragged, year by year, unwillingly into the future. My body is falling apart, my emotions are always on edge, and my personal relationships suffer because of only one thing – me. My most fervent wish is that I could be twenty-one again, knowing what I know now, so that I could correct all the things I did wrong, and do all the things I didn’t do.
While trying to gather the courage to face another day of life I wished that same old wish – to be twenty-one again – and it hit me pretty hard to realize that if that were to happen, and I were to become twenty-one again with the knowledge I have now, I would dread each new day because I would know, I mean really know, that I was going to get old again.
I would see each day slipping by without having accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. Of course, the goals I would set myself would be damn near impossible to complete, because having been granted the miracle of being twenty-one again, I would be trying to fit many lifetimes into one. I would remember all the things I regretted I had not done and I would try to do them all, and once again I would be faced with the reality that time is finite; that you cannot do two, or three, or four, or twenty things at one time. Each day I awoke I would feel a little more dead, even worse than I do now each day. It would be like receiving a reprieve on a death penalty; welcome, for sure, but not the ultimate answer of immortality.
So, my wish to be twenty-one again not only will never come true, but if it did I would be almost worse off than I am now. Where does that leave me? Well, right here, right now, right where I was before. In other words, I don’t know where that leaves me.
It does leave me with one thing – the realization that I not only always see the glass as half-full, I see it as only having a couple of drops left in it, even when it is filled to the brim. How do I live the rest of my life that way? Even though I know there is limited time left in my life, I find myself stuck in a quagmire of self-pity, trying to motivate myself to take the next breath, let alone trying to accomplish the things that I have always thought I wished to accomplish. There is not enough time left to do it all and my aging body will not let me do much of it, but worst of all, my mind is locked in despair.
It’s Sunday morning, 5:40. My dream about being twenty-one again has been shattered. My end is forty minutes closer than it was when I started this piece. What have I accomplished in this forty minutes? What should I have accomplished? And what about the next forty minutes, and the next, and the next, assuming that they exist for me? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure I will reach the end of the day no happier than I was when I began it. And they call this living?