Adagio Sostenuto

When I was about 16 I theorized that the reason old people drove so slowly was that as you get older life speeds up. So these old drivers perceived the world speeding by them, when really they were not going very fast at all — relative to conventional perception or “the standard of youth”.

Now that I am 48 I see I wasn’t so far off. I’m pretty sure in 30 years I’ll be hanging on for dear life as I drive 25 mph in a 45 mph zone.

What I didn’t realize as a budding philosopher of 16, was that the increase in speed wasn’t just going to apply to driving. Each day life in general speeds by faster and faster. There is less and less time to savor the beauty of life. A year melts away like butter in a hot frying pan. Seasons flip by as if on fast forward!

After a day of desperately trying to muster the strength to catch up — keeping up is an ambition which has long since been cast aside— I find myself stumbling. By 9 pm I’m plodding into the bedroom and aching as I put on my jammies. I feel like the Tin Woodsman in the Wizard of Oz, I want to squeak; “Oil can, oil can!” (Oil can what?)

I want to slow everything down! Adagio Sostenuto! My son is 18 for god’s sake! Where did all that time go? I just saw him wobbling around the church parking lot on his bike the first time he rode it without training wheels. My dad’s gone, my mom’s rotting away in a nursing home. I think about the Peggy Lee song, Is that all there is?; But the refrain in that song mentions; …“If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze, and have a ball…”

Well I don’t drink, but I do dance. And I think of life as The Big Dance. Maybe not all of us are so beautiful when we dance, but there is a tune of some sort we hear that moves us. So maybe I’d write; …then let’s keep dancing, don’t drift off and snooze, but have a ball… Because from what I’ve experienced, life just flows like a raging river. It kind of fools you when you're young and looks like a trickling stream, but as time goes by it builds and builds until it is torrential. You start out dangling your bare feet in a sweet little brook in the shade of a beautiful oak tree, watching the tadpoles wiggle around against the brown mud below and you end up hanging on for dear life with the whitewater spinning and plunging you violently through each day. It’s hard to keep dancing that fast. You want it to slow down, but there are no brakes on a boat.