October 2, 2024
Welcome to October!
It feels as if time has been
passing a lot faster in these last couple of years than in every year before.
Of course, I know that’s just my own perception. And it puzzles me. There isn’t
nearly as much variety in my days as there was, say, even five years ago. I
certainly can’t get as much done in my mornings as I once did. In other words,
I’m nowhere near as busy as I used to be. With that being the case, one would
think that time would seem to crawl, rather than speed up.
I have to wonder, should I
rethink this entire perception of mine? Maybe instead of the years beginning to
drag in a slow, tedious march, life is more like…. a mattress in a box.
Have you ever purchased one of
those? Have you ever been present when that mattress is taken out of the
box? It certainly is something to witness and I promise you, it will leave an
indelible impression.
One has to tug and pull and
swear a little just to get the mass of content out of the cardboard, first.
Then one needs to find the space to begin to unwrap it. Yes, it’s wrapped, and
well, too—in shrink wrap.
Once you have it unboxed, you lay
it out—and because this is your first time, maybe you place it on the center of
the naked bedframe. And then you check the orientation, and line it up so it is
in the middle. And then you begin to peel away the plastic. It’s very slow
going, and there sure is a lot of shrink wrap on this thing. Miles of it. But
you work on it. You tug. You pull. The cookie-dough-like object covered in
shrink wrap begins to roll as you pull, and it seems to get a bit smaller. You
bring it back to the starting position, and then you tug on the wrap some more.
It becomes difficult to work
with all that shrink wrap no longer on the cookie-dough thing, so maybe you
take scissors or a knife to the wrap that has been removed, so you can separate
it from the mass and then kick it out of the way—or maybe set it in the next
room.
You look at your fellow un-wrapper
wondering if there really is a mattress in here, of if this is just a joke. And
then, finally, several minutes after you’ve begun, you give it one more mighty
tug—because you’re getting tired—and then say something to the effect of “oh,
shit!”
And you get the hell out of
the way, because this last little bit doesn’t need your help at all! You
somehow finally reached that point of no return, and that baby is unwrapping
itself—or rather, the mattress is throwing off its enforced configuration in
its quest to be free!
At this point I want to pause
and pose a question, something to think about. I know that there have been
serious accidents involving workers and tires in garages, and some in
factories. Has anyone ever been hurt by a layered foam mattress which is in the
process of being wrapped but that doesn’t want to be squished into a roll? I
imagine it’s a somewhat automated process, but I was just envisioning if there
is, perhaps, a special alarm that would
sound in those factories when a mattress makes a break for it.
But I digress.
The analogy, and yes, it’s a
lame one, is that maybe our lives are like those wrapped mattresses. One
struggles for most of the time that it takes to unwrap them. To reveal their
inner core. But perhaps there is a magic point that is reached and suddenly,
that thing exerts its own natural force, and the wrap is literally thrown off.
It seemed at the time as if we
were never going to get all that plastic off the new mattress, and then,
suddenly, it was just thrown off. It was unwrapped and then we had to maneuver it into the right position—after pulling the now
useless and discarded plastic out from beneath it.
So maybe time moves fast for
us as we get older, because it’s hastening us to the point of…. well, you get
my drift. A lame analogy, indeed.
I am not sure if it fits. I’m
not even sure that it makes complete sense. But I do know one thing for certain
and it’s something that I am grateful for.
I don’t have many moments of
boredom as I settle into my golden years. I don’t get as much done, that’s
true. But I sure as hell am very rarely at odds and ends.
No, I don’t get bored much at
all.
Love,
Morgan
https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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