“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”
― Dr. Seuss

My son was lamenting to me on the phone this morning about how quickly the time is going by as he watches his son grow.

“It’s going by too fast,” he said.

I laughed.  BAD Mommy!  But seriously, his kid is four months old.

“He was just three months old,” my son said.  “Just a couple of weeks ago.  And now he’s already over four months.  I don’t know where the month went.”

I forbore to point out how I feel, with my son himself now being over thirty and all.  Where did it go?

And honestly, I didn’t laugh because it was funny.  I didn’t laugh to be mean.  I laughed because my son’s remark means he now Gets It.

Life is short.  It goes by too fast.  And you never realize how fast it’s going by until well after  you hit all those milestones you held your breath waiting for, the ones you thought would never get here.

Ten:  Two numbers!  I’m a big kid now!

Thirteen:  I’m a teenager!

Sixteen:  I can drive!

Eighteen:  I can vote!

Twenty-one:  I can drink!

Twenty-five:  Uh oh.

Thirty:  Oh crap.

And that’s about when you start assessing your life and thinking the fun is all over.

It’s not.  But it does start going by faster.

I was just a couple years past thirty myself when I started to really notice it.  I mentioned it to a friend—“Why is it that life seems to go by so much faster as you get older?”  And he gave me the first and only logical answer I’d ever received from anyone:  “Because the older you are, each year that goes by is a smaller and smaller percentage of your life.”

When you’re ten, a year is a tenth of your life.  When you’re thirty, it’s a thirtieth.  When you’re fifty, it’s a fiftieth.  A fiftieth is a whole lot smaller than a tenth.  The speed of time is exponential.

The milestones change.  Forty.  Fifty.  Sixty-five (retirement?  Can I afford it?  Ack!).  Eighty.  Ninety, if you’re really lucky.  And all through these years you’re asking, What have I accomplished?  Have I set out to do all I wanted to?  Seen what I wanted to see?  Been where I wanted to go?  Said what I wanted to say?

You start making Bucket Lists.

All the things you tell your kids as they’re growing up—all the things your own parents told you as you were growing up—are true.  Or anyway, all the things in the category I’m considering here are true.

Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up.  You’ll be an adult for a lot longer than you’ll be a kid, so enjoy being a kid while you can.

But kids don’t listen.  They don’t believe you.  They don’t have the tools.  And by the time they do, they’re wearing the shoes you were wearing when you told them that in the first place, and now they’re saying it to their own kids.

Life is short.

It goes by too fast.

But—and this is a big but—it’s not over ‘til it’s over.

And the thing is, we’re so busy telling kids to enjoy being kids while they can, that not enough of us spend enough time enjoying being adults—that is, just being alive.  “Life begins at forty,” they say—but really it begins every day, the moment you open your eyes in the morning.

Every minute we get is precious, and we need to not take them for granted.  Our time here is not guaranteed.  The older I get, the more aware I am of this fact.

I don’t have a bucket list (yet) but I am hyper-aware that every minute I spend playing Candy Crush or doing something else equally brainless is a minute I won’t get back.  I’d better really want to do whatever it is.

And there’s so much I want to do.

“Enjoy life. There’s plenty of time to be dead.”
― Hans Christian Andersen