Suzanna Elkin, Nelson Foster, Nate Popik
There is something about weddings that lends itself to thinking in clichés. Watching our youngest son at his wedding last week got me thinking about all the life events that lie ahead for the newly married couple and how, for my husband and me, those events are behind us and our forty years of our marriage is flying by. Where did the time go? (cliché).
Of course, it’s not true that time passes at the same speed throughout life. I remember staring at the clock in elementary school, when all the days were endless. The late poet Richard Brautigan summed it up with the line, “My teachers could have ridden with Jesse James for all the time they stole from me.” And it seemed like an eternity until our infants’ first smiles. But after 30, like a snowball rolling down a hill (cliché), time picked up speed (cliché) and now raising children, striving and careers are behind us and we’re enjoying our “golden years” (cliché).
Ruminating about this for the past two weeks and reading about others’ life philosophies led me to a couple of wonderful quotations. One is attributed to Confucius: “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated.” The other, more useful quote is from Buddha: “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” Sounds like a plan.
