Where does the time go? ⌛
No really...
Where does the time go? A saying that trips off the tongue as we look back nostalgically at milestones in our lives. But, no really, where DOES the time go?
On more than one occasion recently I’ve been chatting with friends as if 2019 was yesterday. On another, I was convinced 2015 was not so long ago, only to be rudely awakened to the fact that it was almost a DECADE ago?! WTAF? It’s like I've somehow slipped through a vortex and time-travelled without realising it.
The COVID years
I think the COVID years have a lot to answer for. That big black hole of time that most of us (especially those who were in the midst of maternity leave or homeschooling) have so desperately tried to bury with a great big shovel and push to the back of our minds. And yet Facebook is hell-bent on showing you the ‘memories’ of the time.
The last month has been peppered with reminders of queuing around the car park for toilet rolls and banging on pots and pans eyeballing neighbours you’d never seen before. The isolation with a four-month-old baby wasn’t how I’d been sold the parental dream, but hey, when life gives you lemons you make up bottles of formula.
But there are the small glimmers that make me smile. Photos of us basking in the garden thanks to an unprecedented early heat wave in 2020, doing virtual baby classes and local walks that made us appreciate where we lived at the time.
We were in the survival mode phase with our daughter, running on a couple of hours of sleep and knee-deep in nappies and cleaning bottles. Our small bubble was free of the external stresses which lay in wait for us in 2021 as I navigated going back to work, house moves and returning to a world with a ‘new normal’. Come to think of it, it’s likely the years 2021-22 that my brain purposefully blocked out due to the struggles that followed COVID. Whatever it is, my timeline is seriously off-whack.
Young at heart
As a millennial who can see 40 in the distance, perhaps it’s part of our psyche to convince ourselves to think we are still 28 or 30. Our memories transport us to times when things didn’t seem so hard, and we hadn’t hit some many bumps in the road. I know 28-year-old Kat is still in there, telling me it’s 2014 and I can order that last bottle of prosecco without consequence. But it’s 38-year-old Kat who pays the price and must put her foot down. I’m more than happy to be young at heart, as long as I can go to bed before 10pm.
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Kat x