43rd Birthdays and Time 🎂🎈⌛️

“This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes. When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?” – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert M. Pirsig

Birthdays are kind of weird time when you look both backwards and forward in your life. Twelve years until I’m 55 years old, which seems so old in the sense that some people retire at the age, and it’s the earliest you can be considered a senior citizen. But it’s a close as January 2014, which at least in my mind doesn’t seem very long ago. I can remember 2014 just like it was yesterday, working out in the field in Madison County, camping up that beautiful spring day at Duck Pond and getting bumped on the expressway that summer. Age 55 seems so old now, but then again when I was 31 years old, the idea of being 43 years old seemed far off.

Thing were simpler back in 2014, but then again, we will soon enough look at these days as the good ol’ days. My successes, my triumphs and tribulations will seem like small little bumps in road compared to world that is ahead. While there is much I can estimate and predict, many surprises are inevitably ahead. But I do believe in many ways I’m on the right track and the best is yet to come. Things are better now, but they’ll only be better in the future.

So many things will change in the coming years. Will I buy a truck? Will it be a big Ford SuperDuty? Or something totally different, but it’s amazing to think whatever I choose I’ll have it most likely well into my 50s, beyond when my parents are gone. Where will I be in 12 years? Will I buy a house, or take over my parents homestead? Will I stay in New York, work out my career in the Assembly building tens of thousands of data frames and other little scripts to build the next generation of data? Will I make it out to Michigan and West Virginia this year? Or will I do something different? How close will be I towards owning that off-grid homestead? Or will my mind change in the mean-time and buy that 20-year old Honda and the plastic house in suburbs?

“Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday’s vision of the future.”
— Richard Corliss