Receding in the Distance

I have been aware lately that time has passed, a good deal of it.  I'm not sure what irregularities of the space time continuum it may be due to, but my minutes keep turning into hours, which are then transformed into days, which turn in to weeks, then months, and then entire years.  I looked around at many of the people in my student ward one week and said, "Wait a second, when did all the people here get younger than me? And by how much?  You mean to tell me I'm three years older than that girl over there?  No way."  

    

I got together with a group of friends from my home town, and, to my astonishment, the past had done an incredible expansion job.  The people I'd seen just a few months ago were suddenly the people I hadn't seen in three years or more.  The boys who used to be freshmen in my trombone section were suddenly good-looking returned missionaries with plans, futures, and sometimes girlfriends that might become wives.  How did the past grow like that?  I swear there was only a couple years between me and high school, and suddenly it has grown to several years.  Is my childhood retreating?  Am I running ahead faster than it can keep up?  Or is it pushing me away?  

   

I have noticed this phenomenon growing more and more prevalent, until it is affecting even recent events.  My students handed in their journals and I began to wade through grading them.  Where the heck did that week in between their handing them in and my returning them spring up from?  

   

I was home just the other day.  But suddenly, over a month has interposed itself between myself and home.  

   

I don't feel like the present is going by any faster than it was, nor do I feel like the future is approaching more speedily; this strange happening seems to have restricted itself to the past.  Something is wrong with our past; don't you see?  It's growing too fast!  If we continue to allow our past to expand like this unchecked, it will soon overtake the present, and then even the future.  And then our whole lives will be past and then they will be over, with no more room for present or future, today or tomorrow, just an endless and ever growing procession of yesterdays.  Soon there will be so much past between me and my childhood I might lose sight of it, and then my adolescence will follow it into obscurity, followed soon by my youth.  

   

There's no doubt about it: Time is getting too pushy.  I want to tell it to quit butting in.  I don't mind the present moving on, or the future coming, but the way the past is taking over is a little bit dangerous, don't you think?  We had better strengthen our presents and futures.  We need to shore up our faltering todays and tomorrows, so that even when they have turned into yesterdays they will be too strong to let the past burst through and break them.  Otherwise the past will keep intruding into our memories, seeping them away into the Distant Past, which is on the doorstep of Forgotten and Unimportant.  I can handle my life changing and flowing and moving ever onward, but I am not such a fan of things arriving at Forgotten and Unimportant.  Which is why we need to make our current lives all the much stronger and more vibrant, so that they can become the past without being swept so away from us.  

   

Speaking of being swept away, this post has now gone in an absolutely unforeseen direction.  What I really wanted to say, is that Allie and I found an apartment to live in and will move in April.  We'll be moving into our first non-student ward, full of professionals.  We'll no longer be renting by the room or living with provided furnishings.  It's exciting, and it's reminding me that we are growing up and getting different than we used to be.  That all. :) But the melodramatic post about time was so much better than what I wanted to say that I'm leaving it as is.  Enjoy!