Monday, September 7, 2009

Time Keeps Ticking Into the Future

This is going to be hopefully a quick but insightful and meaningful blog (i almost wrote tweet. i spend too much time on twitter)

I was just online looking at baby stuff to buy as a gift for my first friend from college to have a baby. I love her to death and she's one of my best friends and so I'm terribly thrilled and excited but at the same time I'm scared to death! Mainly because it reminds me that me and my friends are getting older and it freaks me out...a lot. I'm not really prepared for time to go by so quickly. It's like we were freshman five minutes ago and I was holding her hair back while she puked her guts out at a wild cast party and now she's going to be a mommy.

Granted she isn't the first friend I have that is having a baby but for some reason this just seems so different. Maybe it's because she's my first friend from college. College that we only left not even a year and a half ago. It's way different. We graduated together, got our degrees at the same time and set out for the world as real live bonafide grownups at the same time. My other friends who have children are friends from outside of school. Still two of my best friends but it's different. It's still scary because they were younger than we are now and I was younger and I've known both of them my whole life.

This whole growing up thing is really tricky. I don't exactly know how to handle it from day to day. Sometimes I'm happy that I'm twenty three. I'm past school and homework and everyone telling me what to do. But then for all of that freedom I get bills and jobs and friends settling down and getting married and having babies. That is seriously scary. Mainly because it reminds me that there's really no going back, only hurdling forward at top speed with no way to stop. I recently turned to my mom and said "stop this ride, I want to get off." I wasn't on a roller coaster or anything. The this thing I was referring to is my life. Sometimes I really wish I could stop the clock just for one second. Just one second to breathe and stay in one place. Every minute that ticks by is one more minute I'm never going to get back. It's one more minute to make something happen.

It's funny. My friends and I freak out that we're only a stone's throw from twenty five and while we talk about lavish parties and all, I have a feeling that I'll want to spend the day in bed hiding under the covers. Growing up is a scary thing but there's no way to stop it. My heart thumps a little faster every time I see a new friend on Facebook is engaged or someone else I know has a baby. It makes me realize that time is going by way too fast and I really need to enjoy it because one morning I'm going to wake up and I'll be fifty and I'll say "holy shit, when did this happen?!"

And as I sit and watch the minutes tick away from my life, it makes me think about all of the things I want to accomplish before I can't. I don't know how many more breaths I have left and I feel like I need to make each one of them count. I feel like I need to correct mistakes from my past as well as make new memories for my future. As you grow older you begin to realize that your time on Earth is not infinite. Make each second count for something. And it's okay to be afraid of getting older. The future is a scary place. But we can't really stop it from coming.