Speed and Void

Swept along by speed of time, I suddenly find myself at Christmas.

How did this happen?  Surely the year cannot be so far spent already?  It hardly seems like any time has passed at all - and certainly not enough to legitimize the end of the year being here.  There was so much I had left to do this year that did not get accomplished.  Instead, so much got buried and lost by tasks that mean little more than paying to exist.

This is one of the parts of life that saddens me the most, I suppose:  the realization that I have spent so much of my time laboring (almost seventeen years by my count) for something that I have nothing to show for except a collection of things and the house that I live in.  Most of that labor has not resulting in anything of lasting value or in the sorts of changes that one can look back and point to: documents and signatures are hardly the sorts of things that pass the test of time - or matter.

This is the most depressing part of days like today, where the speed of life catches up with one and end of the year makes one realize how quickly it flies:  the fact that little of it truly seems to have mattered.  And this is where staring down the road of the future makes things even less exciting: can I imagine doing another twenty years of this for the privilege of "retirement"?

I crave - oh, how I crave - to do something with meaning, something of lasting value.  Something that one can say with pride "I did that - and look at the difference it made".  Something that matters.

Something that will not leave me at the end of the year looking back and saying "Is that it?  I was hoping for something more."