It’s That Time
It’s spring again … Mother’s Day, my birthday, baseball: the best time of year in my book. I will be celebrating all of those things with my son, who will be meeting me in San Francisco after completing his junior year in North Carolina. Mother’s Day at the ballpark with my boy; that just feels good in every possible way.
Seems like yesterday, as they say, that I took Aidan down to Oracle Park for his first, in-person, major league game. He was nine. It’s strange to think that that little boy in ball cap and braces, running down to beg an autograph from the players, is now a tall, handsome, young man with a five o’clock shadow. When did this happen?
“Fifteen years ago I was 45,” I recently heard someone say. Ooof. Just like that my boy is a man. Just like that I went from 45 to … not. Every human who manages to make it past a certain point understands this statement, feels the phenomenon of time moving faster. We say, “I feel like I’ve always felt inside, but when I see myself in the mirror .…”
Sometimes that mirror is another person’s eyes. Like the time my thirtysomething friend said, “I hope I look as good as you when I’m your age,” or when my 20-year-old daughter shared a story about “an old person” who came through her line at work, saying, “He was about your age.” Her flustered backpedaling from this unfortunate utterance notwithstanding (“No, not like you! You’re young!”), one sees how one is seen.
I’ve been thinking about just why it’s so strange, this passage of time and aging of appearance. I think, in part, it’s the cognitive dissonance of consciously experiencing our dual natures: our ageless soul and our bounded bodies, of being both infinite and finite, of feeling the strange juxtaposition of the image in the mirror and the inner, invisible, ageless, Self. It’s certainly a process of constant adjustment, melding this inner, timeless self with a rapidly shifting outer self.
I am attempting to bring some grace to this process, to accept those things I cannot change and to focus, as best I can, on my many blessings, not the least of which I will be meeting in San Francisco in a few days. And, honestly, when I’m jumping up and down and yelling at the top of my lungs for (or at) those Giants on Mother’s Day with my beautiful son beside me, I won’t be thinking about any of it. I’ll just be living.
