Who would have
thought?
It’s just a few
hours before the calendar will flip over to the year 2020. And I’m still here. I
never thought I would be.
Earlier today I
created a new worksheet in my Excel budget and cash flow document. It’s a fresh
worksheet for the year 2020. I have sheets for each year going back to 2008. I
kept track like that even earlier, but I don’t have those docs any longer, only
the ones I’ve been keeping since I’ve been in Ukraine.
As I looked at the
year on the new tab – 2020 – I was struck by the numbers themselves. I am about
to enter into another decade, just one more on top of the dusty pile. But what
I really got to thinking about was years ago when I was in my teens, my 20s, my
30s, and how I could never have imagined even being alive in such a futuristic
year as 2020.
Back in the 70s and
80s, even the year 2000 – the next century – was too far in the future to seem
realistic. The only things that would get me thinking about it occasionally
were futuristic movies and Prince telling us to “Party like 1999.” In the early
and mid-90s, it was getting closer but still seemed unreal.
And then it
happened: 1999 became 2000. And I seemed to have missed the party that Prince
promised us.
If 2000 was too far
in the future to think about, imagine how 2020 must have seemed. Twenty years more.
I really could not even begin to imagine myself at such a far-off time. To be
honest, I didn’t think I would even live that long. To be even more honest, I
don’t think I really wanted to live that long. The thing I feared most was
becoming old, and – damn! – it has happened.
I guess I should be
glad that I am still here. In my mind I don’t feel as old (and decrepit) as I
thought I would. My body, on the other hand, likes to remind me otherwise.
Getting back to
those movies, they certainly over-promised the future. Back in those glorious
days of my youth, we were promised that by this time we would be exploring the
stars and have all kinds of amazing and wonderful devices. I fully expected
that by now I would be able to teleport instantly to other parts of the world
as easily as I walk from my kitchen to the bathroom now. In fact, I probably
could have teleported from the kitchen to the bathroom.
But, nope… hasn’t
happened.
I was certain that
we would have flying cars by now, perhaps even running on nuclear fusion
generators (yeah… “Back to the Future”), but that too was just a pipe dream.
It’s probably for the best; living in Ukraine and seeing how poorly drivers do
in two dimensions, I can only imagine the carnage if we had cars operating in
three.
But to get back to
the point (not that this post really has one), we are about to step into the
third decade of the century. I won’t say how many decades this has been for
me. Let’s just say it’s “too many” and leave it at that. It leaves me with a certain
sadness that so much of my life has been lost to the past and so little now
remains for the future. But that’s how life is.
No. I never thought
it would be this way.
As I wrote five
years ago in my post, Life at the Speed of Time, the
cruelest thing about time is the way it accelerates faster and faster as we get
older. Time just keeps passing quicker and quicker – and then we are gone.
I am moving closer
and closer to the ultimate abyss. I know this. But there is still a bit of
space left between now and that point. I don’t know for sure how much, but
some. I just hope I can use that time better than I have for the past decade or
so.
The year that I
could never imagine is here. It is going to be a year of big change. All the
changes that I have been touting year after year since at least 2012 are about
to happen. Do I have enough time to make them count for something? Or, as I
feared in my youth, is 2020 too far gone?
Time will tell… as
it always does.
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This was a pretty random post. But that’s what happens when you sit
at the computer with a bottle of wine. I was determined to write my 100th
blog post before the New Year, and for better or worse, here it is.
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Paul, I vividly remember the afternoon, walking with a girlfriend, when we figured up how old we would be in the year 2000. Forty-four! It was unimaginable. And yet, 2000 came and went. I too missed the party Prince was carrying on about.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with the assertion that time seems to go faster now at my age. Anticipation makes time seem slower, does it not? The trip TO somewhere always seems longer than the trip home, does it not? As school children, we always anticipated something:the weekend, the next school holiday, summer vacation, etc. Time moved at a snail's pace. Which brings me to my next point: in school, our time was neatly organized. Semesters fit inside of years, years inside of sets called elementary school, middle school, etc. Unless we have children in school, we lose that neat organization of time, and perceptually, it just all runs together. When I think of things that happened a couple years ago, it seems like decades ago. When I think back decades, it's like another lifetime. Heck, two weeks ago seems distant. So I don't think time is moving faster. I think my mental organization of it is less well designed. And most everything is less organized after a couple glasses of wine, but I kinda like it that way😊