Time and time again

It’s New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow is another day, another month, another year. We will be clinking glasses, kissing strangers, beaming at each other, treating this moment as if it were different from this time yesterday or any other day. But what is different?

Time is intangeable, time does not exist. Time is a figment of our collective imagination. What are birthdays? Rites of passage? But what passes? What comes next?

When I was six, I was desperate to be seven, perhaps to be taken seriously. When I was ten, I was desperate to be a teenager, to be something of a free spirit. When I was fifteen, twenty-one was the golden goal, when I would be truly adult, free to follow my own path, not to do what others told me to do.

Slowly, my wish to be older became a wish to halt this ridiculous progression. Forty? Surely not. Fifty? God forbid! Older still? Well, OK. I’ll accept seventy because that makes me venerable and that must be worth having. Older still? You must be joking! What in heaven’s name has being over ninety got to do with me?  Am I a different person? Has this mythical elapse of time, changed me?
Forget about the outside. The inside is still pretty well the same. I still turn cartwheels, at least in my head. I still laugh like a drain.

I don’t really believe in it but Happy New Year!