Teach us to number our days

 

Psa 90:12  So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. 

When I was 15 I was large and in charge, life was mine to take. How did I know I would have to start over 3 and 4 times in my life? The kids I grew up with, the ones I spent all my time with in the 1980s? I haven’t seen most of them since 1985, I could probably pass each and every one of them on the  street today and not know them 40 years later. What we called good friends, friends we were going to spend our lives with, working, striving, being friends together? A blip in time. I can still name them all yet their faces are lost in the annals of time.

Forever ended one day, our youth wasted, soon all of our dreams turned to dust and we have spent more time gray and old than we ever did young and strong.

How did we not know that the gray hair would be around longer than the blond or brown? How did we not know that the stupidity of youth would stick around 57 years?

I am now older than I ever expected to be and as I look back I can see so many wasted years - living as if I had forever.

A quote I heard “ Time…it is the only currency you spend without knowing your balance. Use it wisely” I do not know the author, as I tried to trace it’s origins I find it assigned to anonymous or unknown author.

Yet no truer statement has ever been made. I was born in 1968, a twin, yet they didn’t know my mother had two of us in there. My twin sister was born 9 minutes before me, yet she had no life, she died after about 24 hours, 3 months early in 1968 was not an easy thing to survive. Yet when we come out of those struggles, what do we/have we done with the lessons learned, the battles fought? She had no life, I survived, yes with a few scars but a life lived none the less.

We could never have known way back then, when our last day would be, or how much time we would waste and never once even consider the depth of the wasted time we are leaving.

Each wasted day, each wasted month, each wasted year, what we could have done had we just known (and I mean understand it from the perspective we now have) what was at stake.

Each day goes so fast and why? Because we do it again and again and again.

Just like a new movie feels like an incredible experience that creeps by but the next 3 times you watch it, it feels shorter, blander and why? Nothing new for your brain to see or remark upon. Or at least not as much new as there was the first time.

Soon you run out of major firsts, soon you run out of the remarkable and your brain only catalogues the unique, not the everyday humdrum. So while time stands still for no man, it is not quite the fleeting breath we pretend it is, it merely speeds up in our memories for there is less that stands out to remember.

As a young man I should have asked God to teach me to number my days. As they so often say, Youth is wasted on the young.