According to my calendar, Christmas has come and gone. I should be writing "2014" instead of "2013" and the slew of deadlines coming at my like a freight train starting in February are literally just around the corner. Snow hasn't landed yet (although the Brits promise me it will) and I can almost smell spring blossoms. Not a single assignment has actually been turned in, graded and sent back, and I'm already trying to make decisions about when to fly home, and from where. To budget that dream week in Spain or to find a way to volunteer my way across more of Europe while I'm here.
Had I done this graduate course immediately after earning my B.A., 11 months would have seemed like an eternity. Endless day after endless week. I would have gotten *so* *old* in the course of a year. I would have weighed it against lost opportunities, and other options. I would have been all of 22 when I graduated.
But given that it's been over 6 years since I walked across a stage in Forest Grove to get a piece of paper validating my existence as a Good American, a year seems like just a handful of days. Flitting by as the moments of my life drop by like bits of dew, falling into oblivion. The cold harsh morning sun breaking through the freezing fog reminding me that as young as I am, I'll be lucky if I am only 1/3 through the course of my life.
Lucky.
To hit my late 80's healthy, hearty and hale would be a blessing that not too many people are lucky enough to count as their own. Statistically, I could easily be halfway through a perfectly reasonable natural life. 60 is not too bad an age. It's time for a spring, summer, fall and winter. Time to grow, age, settle and reflect. Time to cry and laugh and live and love and wish you'd done more. Wish you'd stood in the cold and watched your breath dissipate. Wish you'd let fear ripple through you without shutting down. Wish for more tears and more smiles. Wish that you hadn't rushed through the morning just to get to the afternoon, just to make it to the evening so you could go home and relax.
All this, and I am in no way old. According to most standards, I'm young. Young enough to still be goofing off in graduate school. Uncommitted to a life of any real meaning. No career. No family. No serious goals beyond turning in a dissertation that passes muster and getting a job that both pays and leaves me truly alive in what I do at the end of each day.
And yet.
A year passes by so damn fast. Not the slow drag of my younger days. Of my 'now I can finally drink' years. A year rushes now, not waiting or pausing or giving me a chance to smell the cherry blossoms before the fade and fall. Paint dries and bakes and chips and flakes in an instant it seems now, instead of lazily staying sticky longer than I care to wait and watch.
I'll be going "home" or to "next" before I know it. And then in the blink of an eye, I'll be done doing or being whatever it is that's next. I get to know, while I'm here, the very inconsequential-ness of the time I spend at Cambridge. Me. One of tens of thousands of students, walking these streets over the course of literally almost a thousand years.
And it's mornings like that when I have to pause, watching my breath hang in the air and think, how incredibly wonderful it is to simply be me. To watch the droplets fall into oblivion. Precious precious glimpses of time in experience. Time that is mine. Experiences seen through the unique lens of me. And what a lucky, lucky me I get to be.
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