Letting the days go by…

Originally published in The Groove, June 2007
by Tracey Stark

What follows is not my attempt at being deep or philosophical, but more an expression of my frustration with getting older.

I’m not frustrated because I’m getting a few wrinkles, a gut I can’t seem to lose, worsening vision or am suffering severe hair loss. Those can all be corrected through various medical procedures, should I so choose. No, what I’m frustrated with is time.

More specifically, the increasing pace of time as I get older.

When I was a child, and I suspect most of us felt this way, a week went on forever, summer vacation was an eternity and it seemed like Christmas would never come. A few years later, the school week went faster because of a heavier workload, summer vacations seemed shorter because of a job, and Christmas always came out of nowhere, because I already knew that Santa Claus was dead and I no longer cared.

Enter college. The school week became mostly irrelevant, summer vacation was an opportunity to earn some extra credits, and Christmas meant it was time to go home and deal with the family for a week. By this time, things had already started picking up pace. There was more to concern myself with and a greater sense of urgency to get things done.

At 8 years old, the only times I felt a sense of urgency was when I had to walk past the Ryan’s house. They had a German Shepard with a mouthful of teeth, a taste for moist, pink, human flesh and the ability to leap fences. I urgently needed to know the quickest escape route and the nearest climbable tree.

And now it’s almost halfway through 2007, I recently suffered another birthday and I can scarcely tell you where the first five months have gone. Hell, the last five years in and out of Korea have been a blur. My family has nearly forgotten what I look like because it’s been so long since I’ve been home, and I don’t feel like I have as much to show for my time as I did when I was younger.

It’s like that Talking Heads song, Once in a Lifetime, where David Byrne sings,

“And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack. And you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, ‘Well...How did I get here?”

How did I get here? It feels like it’s been only five years since I was camping in the Florida Keys with some friends. But that was in 1990. It feels like it was only last year when I was running around Seoul for the first time, marveling at the sights and sounds of Korea. But that was in 2002. And it feels like only last month when I met the woman I eventually married. But that was in 2005.

It’s unfair if you consider that you spend all of your early years filling your time learning how to do things like reading, riding a bike, picking scabs, and burning ants on the sidewalk using a magnifying glass. Then as you get older, you don’t have as much time to do these things anymore.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t time go slower as you get older? Then you would have more time to appreciate all the good things in life, more time to stop and smell the roses and pick the scabs.

But, I suppose, it would leave you with way too much time to develop a sense of ethics and morals and wonder what it’s really like to pop under a magnifying glass.

So maybe there is some logic to it in the end. But not much.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Christmas shopping to do before I retire.