river – Never Short On Words

When you are young you run with reckless abandon everywhere. There is always something new to see and experience. The world is so huge, and you have so much energy that you want to explode to spread yourself across everything. You are more energetic than the time that surrounds you. Time moves so slowly that you wonder if you are ever going to get to a point where you can do what you want, when you want to. It’s like you found a spring on a hot day, and you play in the spurting cool water of time. It isn’t enough water to satisfy you; to cool you completely. You just wish there was more time to allow you to be immersed.

You reach your twenties and thirties, and you have the energy to do those things and just enough experience to try to get the most for the energy you expend. Satisfaction from each new encounter provides positive feedback, sending you to the next one. You wade through a stream of time. The water pools and runs around your legs, pulling you lightly along, but you are still master of your travel. Time can tickle you, but your energy allows you to be in the moment, and time doesn’t sweep you past it before you let it.

Now you get older and your energy level begins to decrease more. This is a gradual decrease, so you don’t notice it at first. Life begins to pile things up on you. Now not everything can get done in a day, week, or year. Family, career, and me time cry for attention, but there isn’t enough energy left to buck time. Time begins to grow faster, picking you out of the calm part of the river and edging you towards the middle. You hear rapids approaching. Do you swim for shore? Do you try to find an eddy in time that you can float in to catch your breath? Do you try to shoot the rapids? Time is moving faster and faster, and soon you are ditching things overboard like goals and aspirations, bucket lists, people and places that are special to you just to keep afloat and not smashed upon the rocks of midlife crisis.

You make to retirement. You manage to ride the river to the ocean and the waves crash you in towards shore. You realize that time has won. It was always going to. Your acceptance of that allows you to just enjoy floating there, bobbing on each passing wave. It becomes fun again to frolic in time, but you know one day you’re going to be stranded on that beach at the end of life, out of time and energy. Time will still surge in and out, but your time to ride will be over.