The Big Difference

Aging is so strange.

I feel like I am looking out of a window, and outside that window I see many things that have changed. Or I guess I should say the things of man have changed. The cars have changed, although they are not the wheel-less, gravity defying wonders that some of my favorite authors had predicted. Other technological change is evident everywhere, and we can freely marvel at what man has wrought.

If you can see past all that, take the time to look at God’s world. It is changing too, but for the most part the change there is slow. I and all that I know or will ever see or do is less than the blink of an eye on that scale.

If I draw my personal window close enough, (imagine me standing inside my own eyeball, leaning forward against the curve of my eye, hands grasping the edge of my iris, and peering through the circular window of my pupil) then my current body becomes something outside myself, and I am free to examine it for the curiosity it is.

I look at my hands and wonder to whom they belong. The strong, supple hands of youth have given way to the ‘experienced’ hands of today. Each scar a memorial to some faded page in time, the weathered skin a testimony to years so quickly disappearing in the rear-view mirror of life.

The collection of experience that is my body rejoices with every new dawn, still each morning the payments due are tallied against accounts received, the black or red ink perhaps defining the day. Eyes that once were clear now dim little by little, needing a bit more aid each passing year.

The ‘me’ inside looking out is still 16 years old, healthy, happy and full of wonder, still wanting to inhale the world like a dog with its nose in the wind out the window (wind door) of a speeding car. I am amazed by the promise of the sunrise and comforted with the reward of a glorious sunset. The smell of the ocean shore and feel of the damp sand between my toes take all my worries, and the immensity of the starry night seen from the top of a tall mountain still reduces me to my just insignificance.

My heart, the one that loves, and yearns, and longs, not the one that merely beats……. my heart still is ready and willing to embrace life, to love and be loved, to ache and fill to bursting with passion. That heart is ready to write checks my body cannot honor, and yet even that sure knowledge is not enough to still its desires.

I am jealous of the very youth of the young, and yet if offered the chance to return to those tumultuous times, I’m not quite sure what my answer would be.

I would like to believe I am wiser today than I was yesterday, but I doubt that is true. I know a lot more than I did then, but knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate to wisdom.

The single biggest thing that really makes a difference to me now, is the fact that contrary to the belief of youth that time stretches ahead infinitely, I realize all too well that my remaining time is not infinite, whether measured in years or minutes, and I am determined to appreciate every person, every moment and every thing to the fullest.

Amen