| Counting The Seasons of Our Lives written by Lane Hudson |
| I celebrated my 53rd birthday this year, and a rhyme my daughter taught me when she was 10 came to mind - "'First things first, last things last, hours pass slo I celebrated my 53rd birthday this year, and a rhyme my daughter taught me when she was 10 came to mind - "'First things first, last things last, hours pass slowly, years pass fast." She had recited the ditty after coming home from elementary school. "What does it mean, daddy?" she asked. I told her the first part -- “First things first, last things last”-- reminds us to always pay attention to the important things in our lives, and the second part -- “hours pass slowly, years pass fast” -- reminds us how quickly life goes by as we get older. I also remember her next question: "How can years pass faster if they are the same?" It was a good question. According to experts, each year seems to pass more quickly than the previous year because each year represents an increasingly smaller percentage of our total life. For my 10-year-old daughter, each year represented only 1/10 of her life, but for me, today, at 53, each year represents 1/53. The experts’ theory may be right, but their explanation is so sanitized, so predictably boring, and so unsatisfying. And, I once thought, so unchangeable and so unavoidable. I could put my own mundane overscheduled life to the litmus test. It was so well planned -- marked off with vacations, birthdays, paychecks, oil changes, mortgage payments, promotions, new cars, and a retirement date. I had become set in my counting the years, marking the calendar, a soldier marking time in drill formation. However, my plans unraveled when I became a father for the first time at 38. That’s when a little blue-eyed baby girl, whose unpredictable needs changed daily (and needed daily changing), interrupted -- no, destroyed -- my over-scheduled and over-planned life forever. But today, in retrospect, I understand that my daughter, in her disruption of my ordered life, taught me my most valued lesson. The speed of my passing years, I realized, had nothing to do with statistical analysis, but with habit. In my repetition of action for efficiency, I had over-greased the wheels of my life with habit, allowing them to speed the years by too quickly, too smoothly – and too boringly. So with this new awareness, I set out to reinvent myself, beginning with how I measure my own life. You see, according to insurance statistics, I should live 75 years, or 27,375 days, or 657,000 hours. (There are even websites that will predict your death hour based on your physical health habits.) But to measure my life by the calendar in only years, days, and hours seems so meaningless. So I’ve reset my internal clock to measure my life by the joys I will have. Subtracting 53 from 75, I only have 23 years until my clock, and heart, stops. But I don’t despair, I’d rather think that I have 23 more spring times to plant a garden, or to see the Braves play; 23 more summers to eat fresh Calabash oysters and watch fireflies decorate my fields; 23 more autumns to watch the Appalachian mountains become patchwork earth art, and, if I’m lucky, glimpse a formation of geese flying south; and 23 more winters for Christmas trees and decorations. But most powerful will be the marking of 23 more birthdays, hers and mine, that will astonish me as my now 15-year-old daughter becomes her own person, wife, and mother. And as for my daughter, I hope one day, after I’ve used up my 75 seasons, she’ll recall her little rhyme and remember the special times we shared together. |
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