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Grey Hair & the Passage of Time
Sep. 11th, 2006 08:49 pm
Been out of the house over the past few days, shopping for Rob's clothes, mostly. Feeling that autumn melancholy sweep over me like it does every year. Thinking about the slow, inexorable passage of time, the ticking of the clock, counting out my mortal span.
The root of mortal, mori, means death. As mortal beings, we are not living, we are dying. Like the year itself, growing old, passing on.
Looking at my greying hair, wondering if I should give up on the vanity of dying it. Rob's right, tho - if we're out together, people will ask if I'm his mother, or they'll think he's a very unattractive gigolo or something. I guess I'll give it another few years, see if I'm tired of shopping for new colors when I'm 35.
I started thinking about how I occasionally step out of linear time to go somewhere else. Fold the map, so to speak, stop the clock. Wherever it is I go when I do that, time is longer there than it is here. Maybe that's why I feel so much older than I am, why my hair is so much greyer than it should be, why it started to grey when I was 12... About 2 years after I consciously recognized myself as Pagan.
And of all the time I spend outside of time, I seem to waste it on making sure I get to work on time, waste it on making it to appointments, waste it on getting someplace here faster than the local physics allow.
Thinking about all the time that has left gaps in my memory - no memory of being here, like when I got hit by the car. I spent a week of local time somewhere else, and that's time I'll never retrieve.
I bought a pedometer today, mainly because the doctor wants me to walk an hour every day at a brisk pace. I keep telling people I do a tremendous amount of brisk walking at work, but I honestly don't know how much walking that really is. So now, as well as tracking the minutes of my life, one sweep of the second hand at a time, I'll also be tuning into my steps. Briskly going nowhere, same as usual.
Anyway, been doing school crap, trying to make Java programs work, math math math, reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, reading about all my ethnobotanical heroes before they became tenured at Harvard & Yale, before the Grateful Dead, before Vietnam... watching an old film of Bob Dylan, watching history fly by. 5 years since September 11, 2001. 100 years since Mohandas K. Gandhi.
I'm so tired.
The root of mortal, mori, means death. As mortal beings, we are not living, we are dying. Like the year itself, growing old, passing on.
Looking at my greying hair, wondering if I should give up on the vanity of dying it. Rob's right, tho - if we're out together, people will ask if I'm his mother, or they'll think he's a very unattractive gigolo or something. I guess I'll give it another few years, see if I'm tired of shopping for new colors when I'm 35.
I started thinking about how I occasionally step out of linear time to go somewhere else. Fold the map, so to speak, stop the clock. Wherever it is I go when I do that, time is longer there than it is here. Maybe that's why I feel so much older than I am, why my hair is so much greyer than it should be, why it started to grey when I was 12... About 2 years after I consciously recognized myself as Pagan.
And of all the time I spend outside of time, I seem to waste it on making sure I get to work on time, waste it on making it to appointments, waste it on getting someplace here faster than the local physics allow.
Thinking about all the time that has left gaps in my memory - no memory of being here, like when I got hit by the car. I spent a week of local time somewhere else, and that's time I'll never retrieve.
I bought a pedometer today, mainly because the doctor wants me to walk an hour every day at a brisk pace. I keep telling people I do a tremendous amount of brisk walking at work, but I honestly don't know how much walking that really is. So now, as well as tracking the minutes of my life, one sweep of the second hand at a time, I'll also be tuning into my steps. Briskly going nowhere, same as usual.
Anyway, been doing school crap, trying to make Java programs work, math math math, reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, reading about all my ethnobotanical heroes before they became tenured at Harvard & Yale, before the Grateful Dead, before Vietnam... watching an old film of Bob Dylan, watching history fly by. 5 years since September 11, 2001. 100 years since Mohandas K. Gandhi.
I'm so tired.
