2023.
It is a marker of age itself that these years are beyond the ones I pictured as a child. I was intensely aware of the distant future year 2000 as a youngster. The idea of being 36 years old was a stretch of my imagination, and that round number, my god, 2000, was so extraordinary it sent my mind spinning. It was at once far away but still seemed inevitable.
But once a person started imagining the distant future of 2000, one was tempted to drift even further on:
Yes, 2000 is far in the future, but what about something like 2020!
But who could really wrap their mind around something so futuristic as 2020? It was a silliness to even mention it, and there was no point in casting our minds beyond that. What would be the point?
And yet here we are.
Am I surprised?
No, I had a lot of time to get used to it.
Though I did think our pants would have been more interesting this far in the future.
As I write it is not actually 2023 yet for me. The New Year is crossing the ocean towards me. It's somewhere over Brazil now, and in Greenland. I know time divides up around the World mainly by the hour, but I like to think of time on earth as a giant actual clock, a longitudinal line circling the earth, second by second, marching inevitably, like waves, towards us. Time is both coming...
And it's here.
Happy New Year.
I get it, I really do. For me, it was the realization that there was a nice, round year in the future, and when that year arrived I would be
ReplyDelete60...SIXTY!...years old. Ancient!
And that year did arrive, and years kept coming, and now I'm nine-squared plus one, wondering how many more years lie ahead of me. A dozen or so, if I go by the experience of my female relatives who have gone before.
And now I also find myself wondering how many more years humanity has ahead. I should stop reading, it's too...not depressing, exactly, but evocative of the wrong sort of thoughts. My daughter and her cousins are in their 50s (!) and the next generation has reached twenty plus-or-minus a few. They're bright, they're positive (at least on the surface).
But...think of the global changes since 1940. And it just occurred to me that in a span of time equaling my lifetime to date, will be entering the next century. I won't be here. I hope my young friends and relatives will be.
That's just it, isn't it? The wrong sorts of thoughts. I wrote my next post for jan. 2 almost to try to counter that, but I think it just comes out mysterious.
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