The simple act of just growing up, and later, becoming an adult, simply makes me want to cry: Halt!
In reality, however, I did not have this sense of fleeting loss until I had kids of my own.
Because – well – when you are a kid everything is a game
Then you’re in college, or grad school, or maybe you are looking for a job and suddenly: Boom.
In a span of 5 years, you graduate from school, start a career, get married, and sometimes become a new parent.
After all that, you blink twice and then can’t figure out where the time exactly went.
If lucky, you sometimes realize what is happening in the thick of it all – somewhere between changing a diaper, worrying about 401(k) contribution rates, and getting the front-yard sprinklers repaired.
I think that something so beautiful should last a little bit longer, or, at the very least, move a little slower.
Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
-Patti Smith, Just Kids
