Against the Wind

Facebook is powerful.
And lately it’s reminding me of how fast time passes.
Sometimes when I can’t sleep (and I write most of these posts between 3 am and 4:30 am) I scroll through Facebook viewing the lives of people I know through their news “feeds.”
Most of the time, it’s a happy experience and it makes me feel somewhat connected to the lives of people who have meant something to me on my travels through life.

But sometimes it leaves me feeling a little sad because I realize that I’m barely connected to people who once were so important to my daily existence. And I realize the relentless velocity of life. Days bleed into weeks, weeks bleed into months and suddenly life passes by.
And so I realize that I don’t know my childhood friend’s son who just graduated college and that I have never seen (in real life anyway) my best friend’s grandchildren.
Work, distance, obligations, your own troubles, joys, sorrows–life. As Bob Seger sings: “deadlines and commitments, what to leave in, what to leave out.”

I recently shared with a new friend that I find my 50s to be a poignant decade.
In so many ways, we find ourselves at the top of our game. We have gained knowledge,  insight and perspective through experience, mistakes and time. We’ve paid a lot of dues.

We’ve tripped and fell over and over again but still managed to find a way through our childhood, teen years, the turbulent 20s, our 30s and 40s and now we’re here: smarter in so many ways. But still filled with unanswered questions, still searching, still wondering. There’s so much in the rear view mirror, so much we now understand and so much that is still a mystery.

The poignancy comes with the realization that there’s just not enough time to do all that we want to do. To see all that we want to see.
We hope there’s time and most likely there is, but we also understand how fast it goes, how tenuous our health can be, we know our strength and we grasp our vulnerability.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would play basketball in our driveway for hours. We found time for stickball, threw a football around and played tennis for hours. We would listen to records and talk endlessly and enthusiastically about all that we would do. The places we’d travel. The jobs we’d have. The world’s we’d conquer.

As I see all my friends kids graduate, see the photos of a college reunion I just missed, watch my own kids launch their careers I realize that I still aspire.
That I’m still excited about the future, still get turned on by creative people who spend their days dreaming and doing and helping and achieving. This week alone, I reconnected with a young entrepreneur that I believe in, talked with my team about building a brand, dreamed about creating a creative village, kicked back with close friends at a great local restaurant and had a great discussion with some really smart people about community and connection. It’s invigorating. It feeds your soul.

But I also feel the tug of time, the need to connect with people who have meant the world to me and the need to be present and to plan: trips, goals, experiences..the things that matter most.
Because while time has always been finite, you just don’t realize it until you get older just how fast your life passes by.
And you realize that how you spend your time and who you spend it with is the most important decision of all.