Back when I was younger, in high school and college and even into my early twenties, I used to think about howthis is life. These were the important years, the glory days. Everything that came after would be the washed up remnants of my youth, days spent yearning for “back when.”
I guess by now i have officially passed over and said goodbye to those glory days of youth. But a funny thing happened. I don’t yearn for back when. Instead all of that just seems to serve as prelude to my present.
Now seems real. Now seems like real life. These are the glory days of baby grins and sleepy sighs. The primary work of my life has begun — raising my family. And when they are older and need me less, I’ll go back to the career that gives me so much fulfillment and that I spent all those early years preparing for.
One day I’ll look back and see this time as my real glory days, and I’ll spend my time yearning for back when.
But perhaps I won’t. Perhaps by then I will have learned the lesson that there are no glory days, no time when life has so passed you by that you have no choice but to bask wistfully in the memory of days that will never come again.
Perhaps the tragedy of life isn’t in the stages that we leave behind but rather in the inability or refusal to live the glory of our current days regardless of what they might or might not hold.
I’ve been challenging myself lately to take a broader and more long term view of life. To see each moment and day and season as a piece in the puzzle that will one day form the entirety of my life.
All we have are the moments given to us today. I pray that I can continue to take and live these moments, perhaps missing back when but never losing my present by wishing for moments that can never be again.
Because these moments, fleeting as they are, are forming both our history and our character. They are writing the story of our life.