It’s my birthday tomorrow. I will be twenty-nine years old.
When I hear myself say that, my mind offers one of two responses. If my spirits are high, I’ll think “Gee, is that all? How’d you fit all that in? Are you remembering it right? Did you really do that…?” And if they are low, I’ll wonder “Where the hell did that go? You were just tying your laces…”
All this to say who cares? Age is just a number.
We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it…
Life is long if you know how to use it.
Seneca – “On the Shortness of Life”
The best things, the most interesting things, the things that I remember the clearest and the most often, were never the things the things that went right, never the things I set out to do, never the things that seemed like the next logical step…
Instead, they were the things I would, as it were, wake up and find myself in the middle of doing, with no idea how any of it had come to pass.
They were the distractions, the diversions, the sub-plots, the tangents. These were life itself and the only tragedy was that you couldn’t deliberately make any more of them than you were given. To do so would be like trying to grab hold of water.
The best you could do was to notice when a big wave was approaching and then ride it ’til the sun went down.
So if I have learnt anything – and the jury’s still out on that one – it is that it’s wise to have a plan, to follow a routine, to structure your days… and then to throw that shit out of the window like a hot potato the second something shiny comes along.
Because that’s life.