Life is short. How many times have we heard it? I remember hearing this phrase as a five-year-old kid. Of course I didn’t care then, but I didn’t have to. As kids we want time to pass. The passing of time is the rite of passage into the fullness of responsibility. So kids say, “Bring it! Let the time pass.”
Having my own children changed my perspective on this drastically. My childish desires for time to pass quickly have long since died and I have grown to hate the passing of time in some ways. It never actually speeds up but it manages to slip away faster each year. With each new tooth in my kids’ mouths, every new physical development they undergo not only means another gray hair on my scalp but another moment I’ll never get back.
And this isn’t even the most unsettling thing. As more time passes I become more deeply aware of the fact that I’m on a journey. A journey that has an end. A journey is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as: “An act of traveling from one place to another”. I am on a journey from one place to another and my passage into another place from this one is physical death. I am going to die one day. So are you. So will your spouse, and so will your children. We are all on a journey that has physical death as the doorway to “another place”.
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