The envelope

It's a funny thing to see your life like an envelope, an envelope which contains all the years, hours and minutes all the laughter and the tears, all the hopes and desires that you yourself believed were personal and part of an inevitable journey. It's only when you look back and concern yourself with the time left that you realise the importance of time.

As a youngster the immediacy of experiencing the new things you were learning and the excitement of every day and it's revelation absorbed you totally. As a young man or women released from the constraint of parental guidance there was the release of opportunity to express yourself as a person, through educational attainment or travel, through relationships and the planning that became part of your life with another person leading to children and the totality of bringing children up. As you progress into the later stages of the envelope there is a realisation of the fixed time span we all have to work with.
Of course if we were made aware of the encapsulated period of our existence then we would distort our lives to such an extent that we would find difficulty in coping, since one of the drives we have is our belief in our invincibility or at least a great expectancy to attain our goals.
Looking back, those goals seem somewhat flimsy but as we absorbed ourselves in immortality there was always time for something more meaningful. Imagine the terror of being fixated on every minute, continually ticking boxes, squeezing every ounce out of everything because the clock was ticking !!
But wait a minute isn't the shortage of time simply a factor in the totality of our unique envelope the envelope is our three score years and ten and that "time" as it relates to us is nearly spent. We are but flotsam floating on a vast sea with little or no importance in the greater scheme of things.