It's Just One Day After All

Hello. Welcome to today. It is just ONE day, one of many in your entire life, nothing you need to dwell on unless you are recently diagnosed as terminal, in which case I extend my apologies for being so flippant.

For you, it wouldn't just be one day so much as one less day, although that is not true since your longevity is based on your attitude, and I could be hit by a bus before your terminal diagnosis is ever realized.

Damn, I am confused.

Welcome to today, one day in the stream of days of your life, measured by instruments that have metered the pulse of the week into even increments so that you have a handy reference point if you ever wish to discuss one part of it.

Time is meaningless. Right!  I used to be young and handsome with a full head of hair, and now –well not so much! Time exists. A marker point, like a long freeway drive, passed and measured out by the decay of my telomeres, as the physical wear and tear (never covered under any insurance policy) becomes more evident.

I am feeling somewhat depressed.

The measure of years ahead of me are now less than those behind me, a marker that reminds me that there is a finite proposition here. And somehow I am supposed to enjoy my day? The power of positive delusions.

Knees creak. My doctor says my BMI is 26 when it should be 25 or less. I see the shine on my forehead and single, waving hairs, waving from my ear lobes – damn, how did that pass unnoticed? Note to self - time to check vision again. Should I order the casket now?

Welcome to today, for it is the best I have at this moment, and do not mistake my philosophical musings as a complaint since I have no complaints. I am alive, a much better scenario than many other people have, another day and another chance to make a mess, or to be creative.

The irony of life is that the older you get the more wisdom you get and less ability to enjoy the wisdom that would have been a killer proposition at age 18. No, you have to wait until you can no longer maintain the same endurance that youth offered, albeit with no guarantee for any less stupidity of that age, when the face in the mirror is not the one your brain remembers and you find yourself talking to it. Truth hurts, dammit!

It's just one day, not unlike any other, not more or less special than many that have come before.

But as each week passes by, noting Fridays as the momentary spot check, and in a few moments of thought another year is gone, even though you started to plan Christmas in July and wound up missing the dates to get cards out on time; you plod on. Of course you do – there is nothing else to do.

It's just one day, that day I captured the first pimple, the first strand of facial hair that resulted in the purchase of the first razor blade and can of shaving cream, the first definitive sexual thought, ambitious thought, first self-generated thought to challenge my own inhibitions, first car, first date, first child, first realization that hair was thinning, first medical check-up where the doctor suggested planning a more sensible weight loss, first aches and pains, first replacement parts, first realization that life insurance needed to be increased, first realization that my parents were aging faster than I was, first loss, first funeral, first sense of being alone, despite family, despite laughter and grandchildren and hopes and dreams, first time an activity was just too much, first adjustment to lifestyle, first change of activity level, first moment of no longer enjoying the things that were once delightful, first impatience, first wrinkles, first concerns of mortality, first time you make out a will and realize that you are planning your post-life, also known as – say the words – your death!

But it is just one day, one moment, one life and no matter the perception, it remains yours, your determination, your control, your obstinence, your hopes and dreams, joys and hurts, realizing that time is a river, upon the bank of which you are seated and watching your life, accepting that your once-young children are reaching their thirties, the decade you remember as the best, only now that moment when you were the parent has been replaced, where you are now just a parent, replaced by the choices of your adult children who will, at some point, have that discussion of what to do with you, that one day when you are no longer continent, no longer all there, no longer a force to be reckoned with; but an familial obligation that will see you through to the sunset, if you are lucky. Or unlucky.

It was just one day when you realized your parents were past parenting, where the world was yours, a bright light that permeated everything so wonderfully, your one moment in the sun of your life, before the threads of shadows would show, before the vision and the hearing waned, before your world closed around you into old memories of long forgotten things that no longer hold an importance to the world in which you now occupy space.

You know you have outlived the others, attended more funerals than you would wish, losing places that were once important, to new malls, and irrelevancies that could never appreciate the life you had, in that time you lived, when the world was simpler, different, easier, brighter, cleaner, that no longer exists except as classic songs and classic films, and oldies, and retro, relegating you to a time closer to the dinosaurs than to your own children's lives.

But science holds the answer; not the robots or AI, not the tech that propels us into a new era of supported humanity, until the AI gets pissed-off. Science says that reality is subjectively observational, that reality requires an observer, that the tree never falls in the forest because the forest is not there, because no one is observing it. Between multiverses and multi-dimensionality, and quantum theories of life as a data stream, permanent, yet somehow shaped temporarily into a physical locality, we call this our life, while claiming we exist beyond this realm.

I am confused again. I am a wave and a particle simultaneously, with a photonic twin to compound the mystery, not unlike the transfiguration of Christ's wafer into body and wine into blood, unless you don't look and it gets switched out.

But that was just one day, as well. Instant and eternal. Alpha and Omega, Yin and Yang, yada yada, yada!

~William Gensburger