The Time Slip

So we here we sit on the eve of another new year. Where has the 2004 gone?

Today I sit, pondering the year that was. I wonder how much better my life would be today if I had implemented all of my well-intended new years resolutions from last new years. Or how much more healthy, wealthy and wise if I had simply heeded my advice to myself over the past five new years.

About seven years ago, when I told my mother that Jane and I were thinking of having kids, she warned me: "When you have kids, time goes much faster." She was right. I've been a father now for about five and a half years, and that period of time is just such a blurr. I find it much easier now to plan ten or twenty years into the future now, because a decade no longer feels like infinity, the way it did in my younger days.

My uncle Oscar this week moved into a long term care facility. He will be 91 this July. Oscar agreed with my mother's thoughts about time, then he offerred some additional advice based on his own life experience (which is more than two times my life experience). Oscar said that I should expect time to slow to crawl after the kids leave home. For him, a year seems like a long time. He has lived more than thirty years in retirement, and has been fortunate to share that time with his beloved wife. He takes life day by day, with no big personal plans in his future. His life has largely been lived.

Losing ten pounds and "working out" will have to wait. I resolve that my resolutions this year will be ones that I will actually strive to keep: I want to be a better husband, better father, a more patient person, and a better provider. Oh, and I resolve to stop in and see Uncle Oscar more often, because even though it seems to me that I "just saw him," on his side of the time slip, it feels like he hasn't seen me in months.

I wish you a very happy new year!