The earth rotates through light and dark; seasonal changes; constellations come and go from our skies. We make sense of this movement by dividing it into chunks: years, seasons, months, weeks, days and nights, hours, minutes, seconds. Man-made constructs to conform our lives and inter-react across homes, towns, countries, continents. We can measure the generations; relate to our ancestors; make sense of centuries and even discuss in terms of millenia.
It’s the most fundamental level of conformism that we all participate in. Imagine the chaos if we all did our own thing..
Anyway the whole point of this is that I just had several family birthdays to contend with. It’s all very inconvenient because they all fall in the same month , in fact, in the same fortnight and right on top of the busiest time of my year and far too close to the celebrations called Christmas. Maybe we should just move them to a more convenient time?!
Anyway. My son reached 18 earth years and I reached the unwelcoming number 48. That amounts to (roughly) 17,520 days or 420,480 hours. I wonder how many of those I have wasted? I prefer to think there were all of value.
What is interesting is how some of those hours seemed to pass more quickly than others. Some of those summers raced by. Some of those seasons went on for an eternity. Some of those memories seem to have been eons ago others only days. How can it be 18 years (6570 days) since my son was born? It seems to have gone so fast. How can we have only have lived in Wales 11 years? It feels like a whole lifetime.
It’s a man-made construct but its far from linear, it bends and stretches, slides and folds. We might be able to measure it but we still have no control over it.
We measure our lives in years; for me, so far , that’ll be forty-eight of them.
My husband pointed out to me that if I was on Mars I’d only be twenty-four. Sometimes life is so strange I think that everyone must be from another planet. Maybe it’s me. So, I think I’ll go with that. I officially declare myself a 24-year-old Martian. Happy Birthday to me. I’ll be celebrating my 25th in two of your earth years.
