One idiom I’ve always been fond of is a “cruel mistress,’ a term which may now be a bit outdated, but I’ve always liked how it sounds, although I’ve always switched up the word cruel for strange in my usage, mostly as I feel things are not intentionally cruel in nature, but rather strange circumstances befall that create aggravating situations.
To be honest, I also just think it sounds cooler.
It has a plethora of uses on a day to day basis but one of my all time best applications of my fave edited idiom is to attach it to time, more succinctly the passing of time.
Because it is strange, so strange I can hardly believe it so it fits perfectly.
I find it strange that it’s time to change the calendar over to a new year already as I find it strange that it has been a full three hundred and sixty day cycle already.
I find it strange how much has completely changed in that time while also noting how many things have stayed the same, as contradictory as that sounds.
On a personal level it’s been more stressful and bad than easy and good, but that is not the focus I’m writing about here, more about how time seems to speed up as you age and how you may realize it or not but you have no time to waste, right from the time you’re born.
Another personal experience is how I’m like a car that has all its parts, has a navigation system and some very smart features, but for whatever reason either refuses to start or cannot really get up to cruising speed and I can feel the road will end in time more than I did in the past.
It’s a scary ride.
So the thrust of this column as one year fades and another rises in its place is to take every moment you can and make it yours as much as you can as soon as you can because the road is always under construction but eventually it is a dead end regardless of the car you drive or route you take.
I’m a victim of that broken engine born from abuse both external and later internal but I’ve learned from the darkest corners that when I had youth to burn, when I had health to take for granted I could have done a variety of things to escape my fate.
It seems only yesterday it was the turning of the new millennium which is now two decades plus behind us.
Before that Y2K, before that, now coming on half a century ago in my case, the heady days of childhood, where time stretches the way it does when you think it’ll go on forever.
But it doesn’t.
Everything ends.
And that’s OK as it’s not a bad thing as life is born out of death, endings least to new beginnings and so on and so on.
What is bad is to let time wash over you, to let this year pass like the previous, especially if you felt more stagnation than movement.
