Monday, March 26, 2012

AS TIME GOES BY

You have to be a cock-eyed optimist not to believe that at an advanced age your time on this earth is pretty limited. You can wonder why you've been allotted so many years, but after a while you take it pretty much for granted that lady luck is on your side and maybe you still have some days, months, even years ahead.

So how to use whatever time may lie ahead? Grandiose ideas emerge that involve places that you have never seen, but always wanted to, projects you still want to develop, the foreign language you want to learn, maybe Mandarin. There seems no end to the dreams. You tell yourself that you have the time, the energy, the resources, the support -- so why not?

But what really happens? You live each day pretty much as you have been living the days that have recently gone by. You don't go to Easter Island, you did go to California again, you don't write a book -- you write a piece for your writing class -- you just keep doing what you've been doing -- and to your surprise, you ask yourself, could anything be better?