95 Piccadilly
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Life can be a grand enigma, full of shifting terrain and unexpected turns. It has a plethora of changes and vicissitudes that send us in all directions at once, often before we’ve had time to understand where we are headed. Last week, for many of us – amid the usual noise of life – tax season stood out as one of those annual down turns that leaves us feeling beaten and a little battered. There is something about adulthood that seems to repeat this pattern: moments of pressure followed by moments of recovery, and then back again.
For anyone still looking ahead, there is often a longing to arrive somewhere “finished.” We’ve all been there in some form: waiting on the watershed birthdays – sixteen for driving, eighteen for adulthood, twenty-one for drinking, then graduation, then the vague promise of stability that is supposed to follow. We imagine these milestones as destinations, though they are really just passing markers on a road that keeps unfolding. What we don’t realize, in the urgency to grow up, is how quickly time actually moves once it is no longer waiting for us.
“Don’t wish your life away” was a constant refrain in my upbringing. It was advice I heard often enough, though I can’t say I fully understood it at the time. With hindsight, I suspect I should have listened more closely – not just to the voices around me, but to that quieter internal voice that occasionally tried to say the same thing.
Even when we can’t name it, there is within most of us a persistent sense of yearning. It rises and falls like a tide – sometimes a swell in the heart, sometimes a dull ache in the gut – whenever we become aware that time is passing and our direction is not yet fully clear. I can remember that feeling even in childhood, a kind of naive certainty that I was meant for something significant, even if I couldn’t define what that was.
I’ve often wondered whether that feeling is something like intuition, or something deeper still – maybe what some would call the voice of God, or simply the subconscious reminding the conscious mind that the clock is always moving.
That old familiar feeling returned recently while hearing Randy Owen of Alabama sing “Feels So Right.” His voice, along with memories of shows like ‘Larry’s Country Diner,’ carried me back to quieter, more unguarded days. If you made a soundtrack of my childhood, it would be filled with that sound – steady, familiar, and unpretentious.
There was a simplicity then that feels harder to locate now, and a kind of everyday respectability that seems to have thinned over time. Whether real or remembered, it carries a weight of loss and appreciation at once.
Perhaps that is the real task of living amid constant change: to let that swell in the heart and that subtle ache in the gut remind us that time is not infinite, and that choices still matter. The answer, for me, has always been to return to what endures – family, faith, growth, joy, a walk through memory’s landscape – and to stay anchored in those things even as everything else keeps moving forward or disappears entirely.