On Time

On Tuesday, I saw a child's eyes light up as he gripped a sand timer. "Look!" he exclaimed, happy as ever, right before he flipped it over gleefully and moved on to the next thing before even watching the sand sink to the bottom of the glass. 
And isn't life like that, really? While we're busy, the moments are always slipping through our fingertips and rooting themselves firmly in the past. It's all so different from when we were young. From when the years stretched before us like the Gulf, all blue and sunshine and calm, and touching both our toes and the horizon all at once. It was so simple then, to stare out a vast blankness of beauty and know – just believe – that surely life would turn out to be good and well and happy.

by Marlene Wurzbach

It's harder now, to think of time as benevolent. Perhaps this is one reason why yoga says to be in the here and now. Certainly I understand the most basic reasons why – so I'm living and not just dreaming and thinking and worrying (and worrying). But birthdays have this way of setting time right before me, front and center. The whole length of it. And so I wonder, over cake: Where did the last year ago? And the one before? And the next? Because every now and then... it all just feels so far away.