According to Einstein, time can run backwards as well as forwards but nobody knows what that might look like. For most of us, time relents only in memories, not in the mirror. You can measure it in years or in milestones, in children raised, promises kept or in dreams deferred. It walks beside you like a shadow, pulls up a chair at the table next to you like Banquo’s ghost.
Shortly after Nora and I set out to move we created a website, 500MilesBlog.com. Our first post featured our two youngest kids flying a kite during a vacation on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I jokingly named it “Time Flies Like a Kite.” What that meant I had no idea, but it seemed to capture the ephemeral character of both time and childhood.
It creeps up on you with muffled oars, as I wrote on the blog. It’s gone before you know it.
When it comes to raising kids and dealing with old age, we mostly have our parents as role models, but that’s a pretty small sample and not always the best one. In my case, my father had a stroke at 68. He never really recovered. He was in intensive care for weeks, then rehab. He came out frail and couldn’t speak clearly. He had to use a cane to walk. Four years later he was dead.
So there was that. The retirement. The stroke. The end. No cruise up the fjords. No evenings walking hand in hand with my mother on a white sand beach. Just a few years in Durham and then oblivion. Not exactly like in the magazines. When I began to think about leaving my company in New York, he was no help. He wasn’t there to talk to, and he had offered no guidance when he was. All I had was what I had observed, which was to say not much.
A favorite saying of mine from the Wall Street days was that “a cat that jumps on a hot stove won’t jump on a hot stove again, but he won’t jump on a cold one, either.” So we do what our parents did if we perceive them to have been happy, or we do just the opposite if it seemed not to have worked out, or, in more than a few cases, just to be contrary. We make our own mistakes.
And all the while, time goes flying by.