When Time Starts Feeling Different

There is a strange thing that happens when your parents get older. At first, you think mostly about them. Are they okay? What do they need? Who is handling what? When should I go back? Should I be doing more? When there is an ocean between you, those questions have a way of following you around. They sit quietly in the background while you work, walk the dog, make dinner, answer emails and do all the completely ordinary things that make up a life.

But somewhere along the way, something else starts happening. You begin thinking about your own time.

I’m 56. That does not feel particularly old to me. Most days it doesn’t even feel especially significant. I work, I walk the dog, I make plans, I worry about ridiculous things, and I buy plants I may or may not manage to keep alive. Life still feels very much like life. But watching my parents get older has changed the way I think about the years ahead of me.

The people who once made the decisions are now sometimes the people we have to make decisions for. The people who seemed permanently older suddenly don’t seem quite so far ahead. And eventually a thought creeps in that is both obvious and somehow startling: if they are getting older, so am I.

I don’t mean that in a bleak way. It’s more of a well, shit, perhaps “someday” needs an actual date kind of realization.

For most of my life, I think I treated time as though there would always be more of it. I’ll do that later. I’ll travel there again. I’ll make the change when the timing is better. I’ll enjoy the house once the work is finished. I’ll rest when everything is done. That sounds reasonable until you realize that everything is never done.

There will always be another email, another decision, another room that needs attention, another person who needs something, another plan that changes. There will always be another Tuesday. And lately I have found myself wondering whether waiting for life to calm down before I enjoy it might be one of the more spectacularly flawed plans I have ever had.

So I’ve started asking myself a different question: if I have twenty healthy years ahead of me, what do I want them to contain?

Not what should they look like. Not what would impress anyone. Not what would make a respectable five-year plan. What do I actually want to do with them?

I want time with the people I love. I want to be strong enough to keep doing things for myself. I want to travel while travel still feels like an adventure and not an endurance event. I want quiet mornings. I want to laugh a lot. I want work that matters, but I do not want work to consume every available corner of my life. I want to sit by the ocean without mentally running through a list of everything I should be doing instead.

Mostly, I would like to stop behaving as though my real life is waiting somewhere just beyond the next problem I solve.

Because this is it. Not in a depressing way. In a surprisingly freeing one.

This messy, unfinished, constantly changing life is not some hallway I have to walk through before I finally reach the good part. It is the good part. Or at least it can be, if I stop treating it like a temporary holding area.

Watching people you love age changes things. Distance feels different. Time feels different. “Later” feels different. There is grief in that, of course, but I’m beginning to think there can also be something useful in it. Awareness, maybe. Urgency, but not panic. A reminder that there are still things I want, places I want to go, and versions of myself I have not met yet.

I don’t need to know exactly what the next twenty years look like.

But I do think I want to be awake for them.

We keep going… upward-ish.