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Insignificant days and irreplaceable years
Time, life and meandering through
“I’m almost eighty,” my dad told me on the phone recently, after having dismissed his croaky voice and coughing as just an old person thing.
It’s true. He’s seventy-eight right now. In Australia, the average life expectancy for a man is eighty-three. My dad has Parkinson’s and, over the past few years, has also been having the usual run of elderly afflictions.
Averages are only that — average, but I’m not sure what to do with the thought that it’s quite likely he’ll be gone in the next decade and possibly on the sooner end of it.
It makes me think about life and the length of it. What you can achieve and what slips through your fingers. How insignificant days add up to irreplaceable years, and how that seems to happen faster and faster.
I find myself in a strange conundrum of wanting to do more, be better, go further, yet at the same time, perfectly content to let days slip by, each one comfortable and much like the one before it.
There is a balance to be struck here.
It’s just very hard to find.
If you started reading this hoping for advice — I don’t have any. I don’t have a conclusion, a solution, a plan.