Another year has passed.

As I get older I find that I understand more, not necessarily know more, though I strive to keep learning, what I mean is all those things we are told as kids “you’ll understand when you get older” at some point do make sense. Maybe not the way we expected to understand them, but we, or at least I, understand a great many things much better than I did just a few years ago.

This “new understanding” and all of the opportunities to learn new things are some of the reasons “getting older” doesn’t bother me at all. The silver hair, no problem, it’s a badge of experience. Getting a little thin on top, again no problem. It is all a part of life. Mortality itself is not much of a worry, we are all born, grow up, grow old, and eventually die, it’s how nature works. What dose weigh on me around this time of year is that it’s a marker in time, a recognition that the earths has made its way around the sun once again, and there is so much I wanted to complete before this marker in time came around.

As kids, we all have things we want to accomplish in life, we want to “be” something when we grow up, “do” something before we get “old.” As time passes those goals change for most of us, and thats fine, more often than not, they should. We grow and evolve, we become more experienced, we are exposed to things that as children, we never would have imagined we would see or do. It’s part of the cycle.

When we are young adults we have new goals and desires, we pursue other paths, it’s the next phase of the cycle. At some point when we “grow up” most of us find that we have settled into a path and wonder haw we got here. For some of us it is a great ride that seems to get better as we go, for some… well the ride is less fun. I have no complaints about the paths I have chosen, the choices I have made. There are of course some things I might have done better along the road, different choices, but the major course changes, I stand by them.

Each time the earth makes it way back to this point around the sun I just tend to think about time slipping by, what I had hoped to do, but didn’t. Not so much a regret of things not done, but of letting the time itself slip by without making the best of it. Or did I? Was I making the best of what I had/did, or was I just coasting? If I was coasting, was that the best thing to do? You know… second guessing myself, my motives. I suppose it’s more of a contemplation thing for me than a self doubt thing.

Reflecting as I type, I guess this annual contemplation is one of those times I find insight in the “you’ll understand when you get older” truths. I guess thats what this whole post is all about.