All These Years

How long is a year, really? Logically speaking, the question answers itself. A year is a year. 365 days, 52 weeks, a trip around the sun; a year. But a year measured in life passes very differently for each of us. As example, newlyweds may describe their first year as a blur of new sex; while a couple ten years past nuptials will see each of those years marked with more enduring and less volatile tides. Or, a year in prison measured against one spent in luxury will stretch a thousand times past, each miserable day a year of its own.

Yet, the question remains. How long is the year? For most, the answer comes the morning after you went to bed as a 12 year-old and woke at 50. It is when waiting to live your life that life happens and, if you aren’t careful, passes by you. Each year passed towards the unknown end of your days is shorter through no fault of the sun’s, but of wasted life itself. Unheeded advice, untasted fruit and experiences untaken and left on the table all chip away from the robust flesh of living, leaving only brittle bones. The old are fond of saying that youth is wasted on the young, not because they begrudge the youth of time, but rather because they have so little to lose besides another day of life they are no longer willing to waste.

In your years, you can do much or little…such is the prerogative of each. But what you do must be measured against all the others in your life and reconciled with what you hoped to do. Each year is its own debt paid; for, whatever you do with it, you’ve traded that time in your life for it and can never get it back.

I’ve wasted much in my life. Money, love, effort…and precious time. I have awoke from a dreamless sleep of many years months to find that they were gone and I was left with nothing to show but trinkets and crumbs. Lamenting lost time is as useless as losing the time itself, but it is the curse of Eden to regret, and I have certainly done my share. The past year; however, has not been wasted in the least.

The past year has been marked by growth and change; both my own and that at least partially influenced by my counsel. So much has happened; things begun, things finished and those delicious things that live and grow still at its end. Mostly though, it’s been about things accomplished. I’ve rarely….no, never had a year in which I felt like I got so much done. Looking back, I wish for other things, projects, to be completed, but that is more than balanced by what I did finish. Of course, none of this happened in a vacuum, so I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge what I did through others or those who embraced my visions and carried them to fruition. They are the true measure of my year, and I will always hold them special and sacred.

Stephen King writes in Eyes of the Dragon, “I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds.” So, true as it is that I’ve written the ending to a happy and fruitful chapter in my story, it is pleasing to know that this one will never truly end. Good works endure, good memories fade without vanishing, and the love of friends only multiplies with years beyond the forge.

So, how long is a year? If lived well, it can last your whole life.

Many people on both sides of the fence would gasp in horror at the mention of Tim Russert and George Carlin in the same breath, but at a time when we mark the passing of these iconic personalities within weeks of one another, I have to smile at what Heaven must be like today. While they held rather different audiences in daylight, Russert and Carlin both made careers from asking really hard questions that the unwashed didn’t even know they wanted answered until put before us. They took no prisoners, took no bullshit and absolutely refused to take no for an answer…at least not without one more try. Pop culture and politics is forever changed with their passing, and I miss them already for their wisdom and the rarity of their type.

Do good things with the week to come, learn something new and be safe.