If ever there was a truism of life, its that time doesn't wait for you, it just keeps on ticking by. Cliched, yes, but then cliches are just uncomfortable truths wrapped up in a sarcastic bow, right?
The passage of time is on my mind for a few reasons lately, but none more so than because today marks the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Eleven years feels at once eons ago, yet like only yesterday, surely that much time hasn't passed? All the wars and death since that day far exceed in number those lost on the day itself, but somehow the emblem of crumbling towers makes their graveyard more poignant, more tragic. This injustice of people merely going about their day, showing up for work, and being the sitting ducks for aeroplane missiles, is pure, tragic theatre played out in the amphitheatre of life. Death always means a loss for someone, somewhere, but certain losses are harder to bear, and certain griefs made painfully public.
I was in New York visiting with family the year before the attacks, my parents the next summer just a month or so before, and I remember them so vividly both for the fact they occurred so close to my 20th birthday, but also because we had just flown home from visiting my sister in Germany. It was like waking up in a post-apocalyptic disaster movie, except it wasn't make-believe.
It gets me thinking about my own life since those events. Events such as these are supposed to challenge us, make us evaluate our lives and live each day as if it were, too, our last. I'd like to think I've achieved some great things in the last eleven years, and certainly I couldn't ask for a better fiance, family or friends, but the truth is, I'm nowhere near as developed, successful or solvent as I imagined I might be when I thought of what my future might look like years down the line. Does this mean I've failed at life, failed to grab it by the balls and make of it what I should have, what those poor souls didn't get a stab at?
In contemplation I know now, much more fully than when I was twenty, that life is what you make of it, that you have to take those chances when the universe presents them to you, that you have to chase after what you want from life, not settle if you feel unfulfilled by the humdrum, else in years to come you'll wonder what on earth happened to your dreams.
For me, now in 2012, its time to dust myself off and move forward creatively.
How about you?
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