5pm can’t come soon enough. It’s one of those slow Fridays where I find myself eagerly waiting to get off work and since I’m not overly busy, time seems to go by so much slower.
Last night while lying in bed, I was thinking of how fast the years go by. All of a sudden, 30 doesn’t seem that far anymore. I am still in my early 20s but I’ll hear a song on the radio and realize it’s been 10 years since that song came out. 10 years!! For me it sure seems as though it were only yesterday that song was on the weekly countdown. It made me realize that 10 years really doesn’t take that long to pass. I mean, highschool is almost 10 years ago. Gee. Sometimes I still think I had just graduated when in fact it’s been almost 3 years since I got my degree. 3 years… and yet so much has happened in those 3 years. So many things happen in a year!
When I was younger, I remember thinking to myself, “I’ve got lots of time… I’ve got so many years ahead of me…” but once you turn 18, the years just seem to go by and before you know it, it’s another year, another birthday. Now when I think about it, life really is short. If you’re lucky enough, you get to live to a ripe age of 80. But how many of us really do get the chance to grow old? I don’t even know how many years I still have left to live. At the rate years are going, I’ll be 40 and then 50 and then 60 and then I’ll die. And that’s it. Game over.
People I knew from school are getting married, having kids, buying houses, travelling… when just yesterday our major concerns were composed of school plays, cheering competitions, intramurals, surprise quizzes, staying awake in class, project deadlines, first boyfriends/girlfriends, and dances. All that time trying as hard as we could to be cool or “in” or atleast be normal enough not to be cast out. Before, we would speculate about what we’ll become after we finish school, what professions we were going to pursue, what kind of careers we were going to have, and who were going to date. At 14, 15 or even 16, we felt we were no longer kids and that we were grown up just because we were highschool students. We thought our first boyfriend/girlfriend was going to be our last. We thought we’d know what course to take after highschool. We thought we knew… or atleast we thought we had an idea of what to expect. And then we graduate from highscool, enter college and suddenly we realize it wasn’t as simple as we thought it would be. Some of us find ourselves second-guessing the path we chose. We break hearts and get our hearts broken, we fall, we get back on our feet and we realize we’ve changed… the people around us and our experiences shape us. Although in most ways we are the same, we really have changed in one way or another. Some for the better, some for the worse.
Although it is true that life is short, it really is pretty amazing. It’s a combination of highs and lows but everyday there’s something new… a new face, a new experience, a new feeling. There are a lot of good byes but there are also a lot of hellos. There’s just no knowing what to expect. Tomorrow could either bring a tear or a smile. But either way, it’s an experience that’s bound to teach us a thing or two. I may live to be 80 or I could die tomorrow, I could miss out on a lot of things, I could rise to great lengths… I just don’t know. All that I hope is that I take something meaningful with me when I go and that I’ve touched someone else’s life… that my life doesn’t go unnoticed, that I am happy and content. If I have this, I don’t really care how long I’ve had to live.
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