My grandmother is in her eighties now. Sharp still, mostly. But she talks about her younger years with a kind of wistfulness that i find genuinely unsettling sometimes, not because she regrets everything but because of how fast she says it went. Blinked and the children were grown. Blinked and the house got quiet. Blinked.
I used to hear older people say things like that and nod politely without really absorbing it. It registered as something true in the general way that truths about life register before you actually live enough of it to feel them.
Now it sits differently.
I am not old. But i am old enough to have some years i can look back on with real distance. And even that smaller stretch has a speed to it in hindsight that i did not notice while i was inside it. The year i spent worried about something that resolved itself and changed nothing. The months i stayed somewhere out of fear that i wish i had used differently. The time i spent preparing to live a life i kept postponing actually starting.
You cannot get those back. That is not meant to be dark. It is just true, and true in a way that i think is worth sitting with regularly rather than avoiding because it is uncomfortable.
Most of us operate on an unconscious assumption that there is plenty of time. That the thing we want to do or say or try or fix can wait until conditions improve a little. Until we feel a little more ready. Until life settles slightly.
But life does not settle. It just keeps moving at the same pace while you wait for the right moment to join it properly.
The people i genuinely admire are not necessarily the ones who achieved the most. They are the ones who seem to have actually been present for their own lives. Who spent the time they had on things and people that mattered to them rather than deferring the whole thing indefinitely.
It is short. Genuinely shorter than it feels from the inside right now.
Live it accordingly.
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