Where does all this time go?

Today's theme, I think, is time and its passage. I've been thinking a lot about it recently, what with my second year of college coming up and my little brother starting marching band. It's rather funny how you wake up one day and BAM it hits you: you're no longer an eight year old kid whose primary concern is learning your times tables and trying to earn your allowance. Freaky how it doesn't seem like that was all that long ago.

I just remember how, when I was a little kid, things like going to college seemed always expected but so far away it was hardly worth your while thinking about it. A third grader will bubble on how they want to go to Baylor or UT, just like mom and dad, but do they really know anything about what that means? Obviously, they really didn't. It's just like how girls sit at the lunch table with their best friends daydreaming about marrying the cutest boy in their class, planning their weddings and doling out positions of bridesmaids to all her friends. I still remember all of that, but it's all crazy how it's now happening. About a week ago, my best friend from third grade got married. Married. How did all that time pass between us just talking in her bedroom to her getting married to a man she plans to spend her life with? She was the first, and two days ago the second girl who I graduated with, knew for four years in band, got married to a guy she met her first year at college. I was kinda reeling from it for awhile- these are ladies not even old enough to legally drink at their own wedding, yet they're getting married. The third girl I know of is getting married in a couple weeks. Crazy.

Yet as I was sitting there thinking about this, I kinda took a step back and realized that I'm nineteen now. Nineteen years old- eight months from now, I'll be leaving the teens behind and turning twenty. Twenty! I mean, I know it's just another birthday like any other, really, but beneath all that I'm just in a state of disbelief that I'll be twenty years old. That just seems so... so old. I'm talking about moving off campus, cooking my own meals, having my own pet, paying bills... and all I can think is "How did that happen??"

It's crazy, now that I think about it, that I haven't had closer reflections on time before. Given my utter fascination with history, you'd have thought that I would be a sight more insightful into the passage of time. I spend so much time reading about people who lived over four hundred years ago, studying their names, their personalities, their habits and how they lived. Yet (and I'll go and regurgitate what you've probably heard from every history teacher you've ever had has said) what strikes me is that things haven't changed all that much. I think that's one of the greatest things about history: even though fashions and names and lifestyles have changed, other things, like personalities and behaviors haven't. Crazy, right? I feel comfortable writing a piece of historical fiction about a woman who lived around the mid 1500s because, all in all, we're not all that different.

I'll end with this: walking around these historic homes in New Orleans on vacation, and seeing the homes of plantation owners around the Mississippi River really made me think just how much we could probably learn if we looked to the past. Technology is great, but they were pretty dang resourceful back in the day. Maybe we shouldn't so quickly ignore what's behind us and rather take from it some knowledge and a little appreciation for what our ancestors did.

-r