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Home » Open threads and the scrolling days

Open threads and the scrolling days

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been doing open threads every day except Sunday for quite some time. I think they’re a nice addition to the blog and people seem to like them and enjoy the open-ended commenting.

But I’ve noticed an unforeseen side effect for me: a focus on the passage of time. It seems to go more quickly than ever anyway, as we get older. But having to put the date down every day highlights it for more. One day it’s the first of the month; a nice clean slate. Then suddenly, two weeks have passed and it’s mid-month. How on earth did that happen? And then, the end of the month comes all too swiftly.

As my ex-husband said the other day, “a year is not very long.”

It reminds me of this song:

Comments

Open threads and the scrolling days — 44 Comments

  1. Time does move faster and faster as we get older, even as we ourselves may begin to slow down. My first dear baby grandson just became a teenager, in what seems like no time at all. The others are not far behind him, even the toddler — at this rate, she’ll be driving before I’ve had time to fully know her sweet baby self. When people used to comment in my childhood on how much my siblings and I had grown, my mother used to threaten to put bricks on our heads to slow us down. I resented it then, but understand now so much better why she felt that way. I wish her method worked, so I could do it too.

    I’ve been doing some writing for my children about our family’s antecedents. It’s been interesting and illuminating, but it has also — like your open threads, Neo — made it impossible not to notice the swift, inexorable passage of time, taking so much vivid, beautiful, immediate reality first into memory and then into silence. I type on my laptop, summarizing in a few sentences the rich lives of all these people who lived many decades, built farms, ran stores, went to medical school, had babies, fought in wars, got divorced, remarried, planted gardens, wrote songs, and, mainly, just lived — the same way I do now, each at the sweet center of their own private worlds. I can try to bring them to life, but ultimately they’re unknowable, really, gone from the earth like snow on the water, just as I will be.

    I can’t quite decide whether the temporary, fleeting quality of everything is beautiful or tragic. Both, I guess, it must be.

  2. My Wife and I are 78. I ask her yesterday how did we grow up to where we are today. We are looking toward the end, hopefully not for a number of years.

  3. I can’t quite decide whether the temporary, fleeting quality of everything is beautiful or tragic. Both, I guess, it must be.

    Mrs Whatsit:

    Alan Watts wrote a nice summary of Japanese aesthetic qualities. One was aware, which corresponds well to your thought.

    I imagine it’s pronounced ah-wha-ray. Not the English aware.
    _______________________________

    aware — the regret of the passing of life which somehow makes that very passing beautiful.

    –Alan Watts, “Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life”
    _______________________________

    If one reads enough haiku, one finds aware.

  4. I’ve got several weekly or monthly duties and observations that are causing me the same thoughts, Neo. Can it be time to do that again? Can it be the end of another month? No. But it is. Sometimes it makes me feel a little panicky.

    “each at the sweet center of their own private worlds.” Nice bit of prose, Mrs. Whatsit.

  5. Sometimes I run across an old post and can remember very clearly what I was doing & thinking & feeling when I wrote it…and then see the date: “What? That was 2010? Fifteen years ago?”

  7. A nice thing about learning French is that I keep notebooks. Each day I fill 2-3 pages of definitions, phrases, interesting sentences and grammar notes.

    I’m on my 13th notebook and 19th novel. I like looking at my notebooks standing upright on a shelf.

    My French keeps getting better, though I now understand my early expectations, based on some websites, were far too optimistic.

    Past days blur together in my memory, but keeping my notebooks helps keep the days separate. Not just letting the days go by.

    Aside from the satisfactions of French itself, the learning keeps me feeling like I’m making progress.

    And I am.

  9. And who was the commenter who suggested daily, open threads?
    (ahem, cough-cough…)

  11. At my age you would think I’d have something wise to say. Alas, no. Time has sped up and it seems to go faster every day.

    I recently had some minor surgery with a two-week recovery period. During the recovery time seemed to pass even more rapidly. 🙁 So, don’t have surgery, it only makes the clock run faster. 🙂

    I’m in awe of the history I’ve been a part of. Born during the Depression, I’ve seen a lot of change. Much higher living standards, but lower ethical standards. The promise of TV, the Internet, and cell phones mostly allowed to wither as they migrated to the lowest common denominator.

    Communism, which was a distant threat when I was born, is now in our institutions.

    I learned to fly when jet engines were a new thing. The piston engines were loud, required a lot of in-flight management, created a lot of torque, needed a lot of maintenance, and were relatively short lived. The jet engines changed everything. They created much more thrust, more speed, were simple to manage in flight, and over time became incredibly reliable. Their big drawback was/is that they burn a lot of fuel.

    My grandparents crossed the plains of Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska by wagon in the late 1800s. But they lived to fly in a jet powered airliner and loved the experience. I remember them talking about it like it was yesterday.

    One day at a time now. Each day is a blessing and I’m thankful for it.
    I’m also thankful that I’m still able to read Neo and her commenters. Life is still good even if time passes much too quickly.

  14. Mrs Whatsit:

    Well put.

    I’ve also thought of writing some sort of family history for my grandchildren. But each person deserves a novel, a novel I’ll never write.

  15. Mrs Whatsit, that was beautiful. The whole thing.
    Lucky grandchildren, you have!

  16. @ J. J. > “My grandparents crossed the plains of Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska by wagon in the late 1800s. But they lived to fly in a jet powered airliner and loved the experience.”

    For those who were born in the age of jet planes (which includes the introduction of computers), what will be the major technological innovation in transportation (to name just one field) when they pass the equivalent life span to your grandparents’?
    I don’t know if we can predict that anymore than they could have predicted airplanes, much less jets.
    Science fiction writers take a stab at it, but it’s almost random shots in the dark (to mix a metaphor).
    Transporters, anyone?

  17. Impressive indeed.
    Will we have to rewrite the lyrics to “19th Nervous Breakdown”?

  18. We’re all on that journey, for some it’s short others it’s long. We all experience the ” end of an era” as Mrs.Whatsit says we just live. For some it’s a blessing others it’s a curse but all do it.

  21. The weeks just fly by as we age. And I’m sure that our ancestors thought the same thing.

    As for the future, I predict rocket powered travel to the other side of the world taking about an hour. I’m not certain I’ll live to see it myself, but I can see it coming. And if the promise of AI comes to pass perhaps we’ll see autonomous flying cars!

  22. I keep getting lucky breaks. So much has happened to me over the course of my life — I should have been dead 20 times over, maybe more. I think I have a guardian angel who is sloppy but nevertheless effective. He doesn’t prevent things from happening to me, but he always comes through to save me when the chips are down. I think he may be a little drunk. I think he may be Irish.

  25. I had to look up the ridiculous proxy voting kerfuffle that shut down the house for a week in this critical time. Apparently some women want special treatment to get proxy voting after they give birth. House members want to pander to the women vote so nine Republicans voted for this garbage. This after a huge fight with the Democrats over proxying during the Pelosi regime. Here are the nine Republicans who voted for this idiocy and shut down the house.

    Joining Luna were GOP Reps. Tim Burchett (Tenn.), Kevin Kiley (Calif.), Nick LaLota (N.Y.), Mike Lawler (N.Y.), Ryan Mackenzie (Pa.), Max Miller (Ohio), Greg Steube (Fla.) and Jeff Van Drew (N.J.).

    I have donated to some of these, including my fellow Californian Kevin Kiley. Never more.

  29. yes back then, the Western powers, paid tribute to the Barbary warlords,

    the Algerian intervention which happened after Napoleon’s surrender under the Bourbons was their painful solution to the Barbary problem it took them 17 years to pacify Algeria, de Tocqueville explained why,

    there is a backstory to this incident,
    https://x.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1908694587515793876

  31. it was a long term consequence, in the 60s, they gave up Aden, which was an access to the Bab al Mandel, which is at the mouth of the Red Sea

    they secured Oman which has roughly the same position in the Persian Gulf, in part with the battle of Mirbat in the late 70s against the Adoo, the Marxists who tried to topple that emirate,

  32. Bob Wilson wrote:
    I had to look up the ridiculous proxy voting kerfuffle that shut down the house for a week in this critical time … House members want to pander to the women vote so nine Republicans voted for this garbage.

    I agree that this is lame. Representative Anna Paulina Luna’s bill also applied to “actual” men (husbands), who could use this perq when their wives are pregnant.

  33. Trump praised Harris during her concession call:

    [Author Chris Whipple] noted [Harris] was cordial despite feeling “the weight of the crushing defeat.” …

    Trump responded with pure class, praising her for running a tough campaign and complementing her husband, Doug.

    “You’re a tough cookie. You were really great. And that Doug – what a character! I love that guy,” Trump said.

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/revealed-here-is-what-president-trump-told-kamala/

  34. I spent a month in the hospital after contracting Guillain-Barre syndrome. My major symptom was facial paralysis, I had trouble swallowing, I couldn’t fully close my eyelids, and I couldn’t speak normally. Consequently, I never got more than an hour of sleep a day. I would lie awake late into the night. My eyes burned from the dryness, I was dehydrated, there were a constant flow of Nurses, Blood Technicians, and the constant background noises. Time seemed to stand still. But I did recover, and all my symptoms cleared up except for my speech, I have problems saying words that start with “sc”(school, score, scam, etc.) That 30 day experience changed my life, for the better. I guess you could say I stop and smell the roses. I worry less. I laugh more. Just appreciating the journey.
    I certainly don’t recommend the hospital or illness as a therapy though.

  35. Family history: in 1980 I put my 86 year old maternal grandmother in front of a tape recorder, and encouraged her to get the tape recorder out whenever the mood struck her. She made tapes over an 8 year period. Last year, my brother digitized them–the tape was still good–and also did speech-to-text, putting them on PDFs. We got about nine hours of tapes. The stories went back to the Civil War: her father was 10 years old when it began. Her father died in 1946 at age 95, so he lived through a lot of changes. My brother looks a lot like him.

    Family history/genealogy has been in three stages. In the early 1950s my paternal grandmother wrote one up. Circa 2000 my sister-in-law rewrote and updated. In recent years my brother has been working on the third iteration.

  36. James Sisco,

    Glad to read you are well!

    What a difficult ordeal. Admirable that you took something positive from it.

  37. @ Skip > “Years get faster every year”

    Actually, there is some thought among psychologists that this is subjectively true.
    IIRC, the idea is that, when you are young, say 10 years old, a year is one-tenth of your life; at 60, a year is one-sixtieth. So that year is much smaller!
    It’s all in the math.

  38. And the relativity…

    (Our personal horizons curve more as we get older….)

  39. As the soap opera says “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of lives.”

  43. James Sisco, what an experience. I’m glad you’re recovering, I hope your speech fully returns and thank you for your inspirational ability to find something good in it.

    Marlene, Mac, Neo, thanks for the kind words. I’ve been a little overwhelmed actually by the experience of living so much in the past lives of people I don’t know. And huxley, I might have known the Japanese would have a word for what I was trying to say, and that you’d know it! How amazing and right. Aware. It’s in my vocabulary now (and isn’t it interesting that its meaning as an English word also works in this context?)

    Neo, a couple of years back my children gave me a subscription to an online memoir-writing outfit as a birthday gift. It’s called Storyworth. They send you questions at whatever time intervals you request, collect your responses, email them to anyone you say and ultimately publish them as a book. You can write your own questions or choose among theirs. It sounds maybe a little canned? But it has worked well for me as a way of bringing focus to memoir writing so that I can at least find a place to start. I write way too much and spend a lot of editing time paring it down, being that kind of writer, so I’m definitely at risk of writing the equivalent of a novel or two. Fortunately the organization has a page limit (and I have limited time) so that keeps me more or less under control. Some of what I’ve written has been about family history, some about my own history. The family is enjoying it, and lately my in-laws are getting in on the act, sending me all kinds of fascinating info as I write about Mr Whatsit’s side of the family. It’s bringing the family together in an unexpected way. Worth looking into — though you carry a pretty big writing job already!

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