Relative Something

The passing of time happens faster than I can keep track of, yet change often comes very slowly. Perspective, perspective, perspective. I suppose a person who masters living entirely in the moment has a more consistent impression about the passing of time than I am able to achieve.

The common opinion around my region is that winter has been hanging around for a long time this year. However, even though we accumulated some huge piles of snow, and the prolonged cold temperatures and additional inches of new snow carried on into the first weeks of spring, it seems to me like the return to being able to see the ground happened rather fast.

What is fast? If someone takes steps to consistently eat healthy and begin doing regular exercise to lose weight and improve fitness, would the weight loss and increased fitness happen fast? Well, if they held to it for an entire year, and you hadn’t seen them in all that time, it might appear to you that their change happened fast. To the person making the effort to eat well and exercise toward a goal of making such changes, a year would seem like slow change.

I am wondering if my hair is turning gray at an increased rate. When I cut off my dreadlocks at the beginning of 2011, it had been 5 years since my last haircut. There was plenty of evidence as to what color my hair used to be on the ends of those dreads. I assumed that cutting it all off would leave me with a much higher percentage of gray, but I was surprised to find it didn’t appear to be the case. Now, 3-and-a-half months later, my hair is growing out a bit, and seems to be graying as it grows. Seems like fast change to me.

For some reason, I have neglected to get my bike down from its winter perch in the garage yet. I expect that the next 2 months until my annual week-long bike trip will pass very quickly. Of course, the sad truth is that when that week of biking with friends arrives, I want it to last forever, but it passes by real fast. Scary fast. Well, unless the weather is incredibly miserable. That can change things a bit.

I’m a little shocked that it is approaching the middle of April. It boggles my mind that we are in the year 2011. How did we get here so fast? Just a little while ago, I was an 11-year-old boy, running out the front door of our house on Cedar Ridge Road to hop on my orange 3-speed bike with the banana seat, to ride down the neighborhood road to see if I could find anybody out and about.

I wonder how fit I would be right now if I had started eating smart and doing strength exercises for life, back then. Heck, for all the healthy things I do do, I still don’t eat as well as I should, nor have I ever done regular strength exercising.

Not that any of that would do anything to slow down the rate of my graying hair.

Time passes slow, and time passes oh-so-fast.