Moving at the Speed of Life

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

- Ferris Bueller's Day Off

It does, Ferris. It surely does. I've stopped and looked around a few times.  It's a nice thing.  Once, at the Grand Canyon, I had the fortuitous circumstance of being in the dark without the moon in the sky.  I laid on a block wall near the rim of the canyon, and once my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see the Milky Way in all its glory, in the sky above me.  For a moment, I contemplated my place in the Universe.  It's a tiny place.

 

So, here I am, an old man of 58.  Marketing ignores me.  Women ignore me. I am left to my own devices.  I have idea whether I have 2 years left, 20 years, or 50.  It's part of the mystery of life.

 

It seems not all that long ago that I was a young man, full of dreams and habits of young men. It was long ago, but the "seems like" has been replaced by the ravages of time.  Time that passes before us like the wind.  I still have some of the habits of young men, but as an old man, it seems that they should have been replaced by old man habits.  Youth is a tough habit to break.

 

In some ways, I feel as though I have wasted my life.  A strange feeling - that of unresolved quests and misplaced priorities.  Would the younger me have listened to the older me, like Biff in "Back to the Future," or would he still have driven into that pile of manure?  That movie is full of plot holes ... but I digress.

 

I feel as though I still would have, if the older me had met the younger me at some point and said, "Don't waste your life, son."  I was too busy wasting my life to listen to an old man telling me not to waste my life. Would it have mattered if I had listened, or would I still be in this place, questioning my choices?

 

It's funny how your decisions culminate into other decisions, and form the life you have led. Sometimes, the bad decisions you make lead to good ones, and the good decisions you make lead you to a bad road.  When you play the "What If" game, your head explodes, and that's never a good thing.

 

At some point, we are at the mercy of the wind, like that feather that drifts around in "Forrest Gump."

 

“I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze.  But I think maybe it's both.  Maybe both are happening at the same time.”

 

Maybe it is, Forrest.  Maybe, as they say, there isn't a damned thing we can do about it.

 

What is it about life that gifts some people with enviable destinies and others with envy?  It can't be purely effort-related.  Some of it is the breeze.  Too much of it, I say.

 

I'm still waiting for the breeze to blow my way.  Accidental-like.