Funny thing, how the first thing you think of when you realize the longest day of the year has come and gone, is how soon it will be the shortest day again. Or is that just me?
I know, from talking to friends of my generation, that time does seem to accelerate exponentially with each passing year. The experts tell us it all to do with how long we’ve been alive. So for a six year old, a year is a sixth of their whole life, so it seems to be huge. Whereas once you hit sixty, a decade is a sixth of your life. The decades begin to collapse into each other. It gets harder to distinguish memories when they actually occurred. They don’t just blur, they merge into each other to create something that resembles a memory, but boy oh boy, it may not have happened like that at all.
Looking forwards, on the other hand, is like watching a movie being played on an old style projector which is running on out of control. Images flicker with dizzying speed, and fail to make much sense. So you close your eyes, and remind yourself to just see what’s in front of you when you open them.
At least, that’s what I try to do. Sometimes it works, and I can focus on the here and now, taking in the beauty and the chaos around me. When that doesn’t work, I can always get back to the laptop and write another episode of the podcast. Helen seems to be able to deal with whatever life throws at her with much more equanimity than I can. That, like my crazy garden, gives me a lot of pleasure.