Letting Go of the Past

            Another year has almost run its course, and a new year fast approaches.  It seems that each year we look back and remember both the bad and good; and think about the opportunities yet to present themselves.

            But this year is different.  My new opportunity came as a Christmas email – after a decade of work and years of sending out submissions – my book series is going to be published.

Friends I tell are happy for me.  My mother is proud of me.  And me – I'm scared stiff!

Since I was a child, I've been teased about my planning and perpetual list making.  I am not a 'spur of the moment' person.  For me, half of the vacation is the preplanning. 

And now I have pages of questions to answer: about me, my characters, the first book and how I think the cover should look.  Now, while I'm perfectly able to answer questions about me; and I my characters and stories are a part of me – I am ashamed to admit that I never thought about what my book cover(s) should look like.

I wouldn't say I didn't believe in myself – of the quality of my work, or that a publisher would see merit in it.  However, I will admit that after four or five years of sending out queries and receiving the same, short rejection – sometimes after months of waiting – I hadn't spent much time imaging a book cover.  And now I do not have the luxury of mapping out the future.

So, as the year passes, my one New Year's resolution shall be to try to not spend so much time and effort in the planning of life's adventures and more in the living them.

Let's Do The Time Warp Again . . .

Time is a funny thing.  Remember when you were a kid?  New Year’s to Christmas seemed like an eternity.  Yet, somehow summer vacation, smack in the middle of that desert of time, skipped by in a flash.  Ah, the conundrums of life.

I had found how quickly college whizzed by disturbing, but then I graduated and ‘life’ happened.  Planning a wedding, finding a job and setting up an apartment rushed, tsunami-like, over me, gave me little time to think.  And so it went.

Somewhere in my thirties, I think I did have a fleeting notion that time had somehow ‘sped up’.  But, back then, we didn’t even listen to ourselves.

My forties brought about an interesting paradigm – sickness, death and unhappiness.  Now time slowed to a crawl.  Sitting with my dying mother-in-law for half an hour – listening to her struggle to breath – was torture.  And the nights spent lying awake, crying because the love of your life doesn’t love you any more, was even more terribly slow.  Time had stopped.

As I approached fifty, I’d made some changes in my life.  I’d moved on and carved a new, happy life for myself.  And even though life – well, really death – invaded once again.  But it was all right.  Time had returned to normal.

But now, as I’m sliding towards sixty, time has sped up again.  I don’t feel ‘old’ – until I see some ‘60s rocker doing a commercial for reverse mortgages or funeral insurance.  Even then it’s more of a ‘How the hell did that happened ?’ thing.  Nevertheless, I felt the world speeding up beneath me. 

However, the fact is that it’s only our perception of passing time that’s quickened.  Time is a constant.  It is we who change.