I got a new watch for Christmas. Ordinarily, a watch for Christmas isn’t big news unless it’s made by Rolex, Breitling or TAG Heuer. This one isn’t. It’s a Citizen Eco-drive. It’s somewhere between sporty and elegant, has multiple functions and is solar powered. I like that. Not only does it meet my needs, but the solar part satisfies my inner tree hugger.
In the two weeks I’ve been wearing the watch, though, it’s gotten me thinking a lot about time. Not so much the moment at hand, but time in the larger scope. The past. The future. The kind of time that drives you crazy if you start thinking about it.
The whole sordid wrestling match came about when I took off my old watch for the last time and put on my new one. I was suddenly flooded with memories. When I was in college, there was a corner jewelry store halfway between the journalism building and the newspaper where I worked. Every day I would walk past the store and admire this one particular watch that was on display in the window. It was far too expensive for a college student’s budget, but it became embedded in my imagination. When I graduated, relatives and friends sent congratulatory cards my way, many of which included money and instructions to buy something nice. I did. That watch.
Over the next 25-plus years, that watch and I went through a lot together. It was on my wrist when I dove into the ocean for the first time on a scuba trip. It stayed with me when I got bounced out of boat and into the raging river on a whitewater rafting excursion. It outlasted three wristbands and countless batteries. It kept me on time and on schedule. Finally, though, the bezel stopped spinning, the light burned out and the buttons stopped working. The waterproof seal no longer held tight and moisture got inside, leaving a fog on the underside of the crystal. A new watch was needed. It was, well, time.
That wasn’t so hard, though. The difficulty came when I realized that I wore that watch for more than half my life, and that time—if I may rewrite the Rolling Stones song—is no longer on my side. My life is now half over. At least.
It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about time anyway. I have. I have a birthday coming up in a few months. It’s one of those milestone birthdays. To me, birthdays are not that big of a deal. I’m kind of embarrassed by the fuss, and after you’ve had so many of them they have a tendency to just blend in with every other day. Except some. Some birthdays are landmarks, monuments erected to identify the passage of time. This is one of them. I’m turning 50.
I didn’t mind turning 30. Or 40, for that matter. But for some reason 50 is lurking over me like a vulcher.
At Xavier, one of the grizzled old Jesuits created a program: “The Second Fifty: Spirituality in Later-Life Issues,” which seeks to offer meaning, direction and spirit to those in the second half of their lives. That’s about to be me. I’m just not sure I’m ready for it.
With time running through my mind, an article on aging in yesterday's The New York Times naturally caught my eye. It offered advice on aging from those who would know—old people. Really old people. People in their 90s. “Embrace it,” they said. “Don’t fight it. Growing older is both an attitude and a process. Don’t waste your time worrying about getting old.”
That’s good advice. And it got me thinking again. It seems to me there’s a difference between getting older and getting old. The first is inevitable; the second isn’t. Even though I’ll soon be eligible for senior discounts at Perkins and mail from AARP will soon be filling my mailbox, that doesn’t mean I have to start mall walking or drive some great wheeled barge with my left blinker on. Yes, I may now be the oldest one at the gym, but that doesn’t mean I should quit and take up shuffleboard.
Screw it. I’ve done too much to regret my past and have too many things I still want to do to not look forward to my future. My new watch tells me I’ve spent too much time worrying about time. Onward, I say, to the second 50.
