Last night I was YouTube surfing, when I saw that Bill Murray was on Kimmel. I was struck by how old he appeared, having just celebrated his 75th birthday. There was a part of me that was thinking, gosh, he might not have a lot of time left. Or he could live for another 20 years. I felt unusually sad about the passage of time.
On one hand, I feel pretty good about having purpose in life, knowing it is limited. As I've said before, be kind to others, make art, help out, leave things better than you found them. But sometimes it does feel as if I have to write like I'm running out of time, as per Hamilton. And then there's the perception of time passage, how that changes as you get older. You have all of these markers in your life, like relationships, jobs, moving, kids and such.
I've lived in Orange County for 12 years now, eight of those in this house. For someone who used to be adverse to change in my younger days, this feels strange. These 12 years have felt "faster" than others, despite having a pandemic in the middle. Consider the decade prior, which included three serious relationships, six jobs, 6,000 miles of moving and one child. The decade before that was one relationship, but included the end of college, a career pivot and 9/11, plus I was younger so most experiences were new. I haven't been static in "the Florida era," but it seems to have happened so fast.
Now I'm doing all kinds of rationalization about time. For example, half of my life gets me back to 1999, which seems impossibly distant, so that time hasn't felt fast in that context. And if I were to go 26 years forward, I would be older than Bill Murray, so that kind of feels like I have lots of time. But you never know, because you're one Florida driver away from your demise, or one cell that goes rogue and causes cancer. On the other hand, life expectancy keeps getting longer, so maybe Bill Murray isn't old at all. When I'm looking at quarter-centuries, it's possible that I'm entering Act III, but in a four-act play.
Aging is so weird. But given the relative brevity of life, it sure is hard to understand how so many people can be so hateful. Who has time for that?
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