TGIF

Friday!

I was thinking this morning, as I roused the children, how special Fridays are when you are a child. They roll out of bed with grins and anticipation of all the special-ness of the day. They have looked forward to it for so long.

To a child, a week is such an enormous length of time. Once my dad explained this phenomenon to me by saying that when you are 2 years old, one year is half a lifetime. By the time you are 4, one year is only a quarter of your lifetime. And so on.

It's no wonder that one of the things we lose as we age is the appreciation for looking forward. It's as though there is a point on the horizon of the time-line for our lives, and our eyes are fixed on it. As we come closer to that point (a mid-point?), we begin to see only what is in the present. As we begin to age past that point, more and more we look to the past.

When you think about it this way, who are the ones among us that have the most far-reaching gaze? It seems to me that it is the very young and the very old who have the natural capacity to look further, either forward or back, than the ends of their noses.

Perhaps through the eyes of my children I can recapture a bit of the wonder and mystery of what lies ahead. Like Fridays. It's pizza day. Movie and popcorn night. The end of a long week.

And when my parents visit this evening, maybe over supper I will ask them to let me borrow their view of Fridays long ago.