So I’m 27 today. I feel like a horse at the starting gate, waiting for the pistol to bang. But I’m no ordinary race horse. I’m a sentient, intelligent horse, the hoof clopping, numbers crunching kind, and I know that if I fall down and break something, they’re gonna shoot me. Or worse, they’d strap me into a chair and perform surgical probing operations on me to figure out how a horse got to be so smart. Mainly, the point is, I wouldn’t survive without being damaged.
And that’s what it’s like to grow old.
Really. Twenty-seven. That’s nothing, right? Obviously. But it’s one step closer to the center of the wheel, on which a point circumnavigates around the central radius more quickly the nearer it approaches dead center. The phrase is not at all unfounded.
I’m reading Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo, which was written just before the Internet emerged as the dominant world religion. It details the worldly exploits, sexcapades, and scandals engaged in by Monsieur Augustine when he was a young man and free. It’s a journey of self and unified thought about God and the nature of reality as he thinks through life’s most pertinent and pressing questions. Issues of faith, of fidelity, of finality. He merges personal experiences and struggles with grand and universal musings on Christian duty and human needs and desires, the balance struck between secular and sacred, and the ultimate destination of the soul.
To put it in the words of Stephen King, Everthing’s Eventual.
So I’m 27 today. I don’t wish I could reverse time. I’d prefer to simply shackle it, contain it, revise its rules, or divorce myself from it. Time, as I’ve come to realize, is a commodity unlike any other. If it were traded on the stock market, it’d be the lowest priced stock, but as soon as it was purchased, its value would increase exponentially. Its buyers would be unable and unwilling to sell it. Its value would never decrease, but slowly, the number of shares each buyer had would diminish, until the final nanosecond of his or her life, at which point the value of the very last share of time would be infinitely great.
Gordon Gecko said greed is good. With time, greed only kills you slowly.
I’m aware all this introspection at 27 is a tad melodramatic. It is a blog. Happy birthday, me.