Unlike the board game, the game of Life doesn’t have all its spaces neatly squared away in order. The natural order of things sometimes goes awry. Through our teens and 20s we see our friends through milestones. There are graduations and degrees and marriages and births. The air bursts in a celebratory dance. We walk hazily, perm-a-grin plastered on our visage as we get drunk on good news. And then we start to measure life’s milestones based on the footsteps of our children as they take center stage and we take a seat. The milestones we celebrate take us from the plateau of adolescence up the steep mountain of our teenage years into our first steps as adults. We leap. There are more highs than lows. We are protected by an impenetrable aura of celebration punctuated with sparks, stars, confetti, and crêpe paper.
Yet there comes a point in our adulthood that these milestones become peppered with sadness. While there are still celebrations, we find ourselves aging, our parents aging, and life, along with gravity, taking its toll. Somehow the universe shifts so we move away from walking alongside our friends down the aisle to being at our friends’ side to mark sadder occasions. There are steps in life that we take in a tenuous tiptoe and some we mark with a grand leap. There are times that life’s milestones seem to be spread farther apart than they used to be. Every smile, clap, giggle, and step that mark the passing of time and growing of children evolve into wider steps and more momentous occasions.
Sometimes the milestones feel like shifty rocks, moving swiftly as I take a step away just in time. Perhaps I’m facing the epiphany of seeing more time behind me than ahead. Perhaps the Time Bandit has made his presence more palpable as I feel the chill of mortality. There continue to be moments worth celebrating, of course. Those moments are plentiful, and not just the grand ones. But there is a teetering moment in time that we must stop and turn around and reflect on what was rather than what could have been. It’s at this time that we know the past made us but the future will hold us. And it’s now we must think what our legacy will be.
Beautifully written. I think those of us who are worried about our legacy are probably the ones who when the time comes will be the most satisfied with what we have left behind. We tend to be the ones who consistently ask ” how can I do more” thus always readjusting and refining what we will leave behind.