Paul E. Anna: High Points

The full moon. The New Year. The Mayan calendar.

There are a number of markers out there that are making me think about the passage of time these past few days. Like most of us, I can’t believe that the holidays have already come and are nearly gone, and that 2012 will soon be nothing but a memory.

Rarely do I hear anyone say that time passes too slowly. Usually when people comment about time it is to note that the clock is fleeing by at an inexorable pace. Sure there are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week and 52 of them in a year. And this year we actually were blessed with an extra day, as it was a leap year. But it always seems that the hours, days, weeks, and months pass with greater alacrity each and every year. How come? You got me.

Maybe it is not that time passes with an ever quickening speed but that we tend to notice it more as we age. Maybe as the clock tick, tick, ticks on our mortality we feel it and pay attention to it more. Perhaps we are cognizant of the sands running out of the hourglass. Here in this, how should I refer to it,….”aging” community the majority of us look at days that are diminishing in number as we are in the second half of our lives on this spinning sphere.

Or perhaps it is that we are so blessed with full, vibrant and busy lives that we are aware that squeezing everything in to a finite number of hours is a challenge. Life, love, families, skiing, philanthropy, work, relaxation, dining, learning, dining again, sleeping. These activities all take time and when you add them up, and include others, maybe drinking for example, there are precious few hours for anything but the most basic of the basics. And drinking. Again.

The fact is time is one of those things that we can’t control. The globe will keep turning. The clocks will keep ticking, The pages of the calendar will keep becoming irrelevant with each new day. So the key is acceptance. We all have to be good with the fact that we can only do the things that we can do and that the rest of the stuff will take care of itself. We are so conditioned to be in control of everything in our lives that we expect that we can master time too. It ain’t gonna happen. Understand and accept that and things will be a little less stressful.

I remember when I was a kid and thought about the new millennium and it seemed like an humongous thought to fathom. The concept of 2001 (a Space Odyssey, remember?) seemed like an impossibility, a time that others would experience but not me.

Well here we are, nearly 13 years into that unfathomable century and the clock keeps ticking on me. As they say, it sure beats the alternative.

High Points wants to wish you a very happy New Year and hope that rather than fighting the tick-tock of the clock, you’ll be able to embrace it in 2013.