Mark McNease

Narration provided by Wondevox

By Mark McNease 

Time is not so much an arrow as a comet we ride, streaking across the sky.

You can tell from the first sentence I was 62 when I wrote this. Five years later my perspective on the fleeting nature of time hasn’t changed. I’ve long said that “time is a non-renewable resource,” and I still believe that. The older we get, the less of it we have. That’s not maudlin, it’s just true. As yet another friend died recently, it seemed like a good time to revisit the subject. Pun intended.

The good news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. The bad news is that I’m old enough to collect Social Security. When I was twenty, I never imagined being forty. It seemed so far away from that youthful ground I stood upon with naive bravado. Then when I hit forty, I thought fifty would be the last milestone to publicly mark, quietly retiring birthday observations with the exception of a few close friends and family. And finally, when I approached the age when referring to oneself as a senior becomes culturally appropriate, I decided I could at minimum look forward to collecting a monthly stipend for my troubles. We should all be paid for getting old, at least those of us lucky enough to live that long.

I was a wild child in many ways, defiant to a fault. I became a teenager whose rebellion was sometimes life threatening, and eventually I grew into a man with the sorts of weaknesses and appetites that make it slightly remarkable I’m still here. So seeing a direct deposit into my checking account every month from the Social Security Administration is a reminder that a lot of people don’t survive to collect this modest reward. Cancer gets them, or leukemia, or car accidents, or sudden organ failure. A thousand different ways to end this train ride called life before it gets to the last few stations. Friends I lost to HIV are long dead, and memories I have of them are flashcards of much younger men. Were they to stand in front of me again, I may recognize them, but they probably would not recognize me forty years later.

Time is not so much an arrow as a comet we ride, streaking across the sky. We only think it drags because we’re on it, like riders saddling imaginary horses that stand stock still while the ground moves beneath us. We experience time when it is behind us or in front of us, but seldom when it is right where we are. And so it seems to move slowly or quickly, its speed determined by our anticipation of something not yet occurred, or our disbelief at how much is behind us.

It’s only fitting we be paid while we’re still young enough to benefit from it. It’s the least society can do to compensate us for our patience. It seems time really is money, and just as fleeting. We may not spend either of them all in one place, but we will certainly spend them all in one lifetime.