Traveling down the highway, road tripping at 65 miles an hour…the not uncommon exclamation, “Did you SEE THAT?!!” as we quickly pass another milestone or marker….each of us seeing something a little different from the other.
Most of the time, we noticed…sometimes just barely.
My daughter plays the cello.
She finds her own ways to have fun with it.
This Friday she graduates from high school.
Another marker flying by.
The funny thing is that, until you pass the milestone, you think that you’re just out for another Sunday drive, a meandering voyage through the familiar country lanes….breeze on your face, fried chicken for lunch, no hurries or worries or thoughts of the future.
No thoughts of what you might have missed when you looked down to adjust the radio.
And then you pass the “milestone” on the one way country road and you wake up and wonder:
“How the heck did I end up on the Autobahn?”
The autobahn? Now you’re driving to survive…faster than you ever wanted to go and no one is saying, “did you see that?”….we’re all just white knuckled, eyes forward vessels of adrenaline…looking for the first place to exit so we can catch our breath.
But if we realized how fast the journey really goes, we’d never get in the car in the first place.
How do you even keep something that fast on the road? It sounds impossible.
My daughter plays the cello.
She started playing in the 6th grade…and played all through high school.
The funny thing about vehicles is that even though some of us may pick a fast car…and some of us may pick a slow truck…I think that the general consensus when we near the end of even a small part of our journey through life is that, “that part went a lot faster than I thought it would.”
Maybe we improve our driving skills as we get older….maybe we get fatalistic about the whole game, sure that something weird like a wheel flying off at one hundred miles an hour is just around the next bend. Maybe we just take the closest on ramp and get swept along with all the other vehicles moving forwards.
We move forward. That’s our option. Fast…or slow…we move forward.
My daughter plays the cello. That’s a small part of who she is…a small part of what she does.
They say that at the end, your life flashes before your eyes. That’s something that, thankfully, I haven’t experienced yet.
But I have to wonder if some parts don’t flash before my eyes as I move through the middle of my life?
When our oldest children were young, someone wiser than me said, “you better pay attention”. And in between remodeling a gutted house, working….and dealing with all the other distractions I provided myself…I really did try to pay attention.
If someone yelled out, “DID YOU SEE THAT?!”…I think that, at least some of the time, my response would have been, “What?! What did I miss?!”
My oldest child plays the cello. My oldest graduates this Friday.
I saw that.