The Hourglass

 I remember when I was little and my mom (who would die if she knew this was written for posterity online) would watch “Days of our Lives”. 

“Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” Or something like that.

I was having a conversation with someone tonight in social media comments about favorite and least favorite months and seasons and so on. In the discussion, as I tried to explain why I dislike November so much more than even January or February, I made a comment like, “Once you get to January, you’re in the dead of it (winter), but at least you’re making progress. November is the very beginning and so far away from summer.” It made me think of how I’ve always loved Thursday more than Friday and the way I prefer the days before school gets out over the first days of summer. I love the anticipation of the thing most, because once the thing starts, the clock is ticking. I’ve always said I don’t hate August and September because at least the countdown is on to summer, versus during summer when you feel like the hourglass sand is slipping through your hand.

I do better in the middle of the ick, I said, than at the beginning of it.

I hate that feeling of trying desperately to hold onto something as it slides past, what Andrew Marvell referred to in the poem we read in class last week as “Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near”. But after all, what else is living, if not the constant starting and ending of every single thing in the world? The starting and ending of days and weeks and months and seasons and years and parenting phases and classes and friendships and hobbies and hopefully pandemics and diets and crises and achievements and failures and books and meals and laundry (just kidding, that never actually ends) and on and on and on and on. And on. While we just sit and try to hang on to vestiges of the good and happily relinquish the bad.