Tuesday birthday haiku
Another year past,
another solar orbit.
Time flies, doesn’t it?
My birthday sure came around quickly this year. It seems only a week or two ago that I was digging my driveway out of the snow so that I could head off to Christmas Day festivities, a month or so before that it was Easter, and then a few weeks prior to that it was my previous birthday. Tempus does indeed fugit…
In your pre-teens time takes an eternity, often measured by the arrivals of birthdays, summer holidays, Easter and Christmas. Then you hit your teens and things are then measured (at least where I grew up) by notable birthdays — 13 (teenager!), 15/16 (age of consent), 17 (driving licence) and 18 (drinking age). Aside from the round numbers of 20 and 25, and the more traditional and now meaningless “coming of age” 21st birthday, in your twenties you notice that these events start to speed up. I’m now officially in my “late thirties” and they’re getting even faster. But there’s hope once you get into your forties, fifties and beyond. No, wait… I got that wrong. There isn’t. It just gets faster still, so I’m told.
But it’s not all bad. Growing old is a privilege that most of humanity doesn’t get — even in this day and age. I also like to reflect that those who have achieved mighty things had exactly the same hours in each of their days as I have in mine. If anything, we have more leisure time available than any of the generations who have gone before us. Most of us get Saturday off for a start, saying nothing of not having to forage for food or shelter, and living twice as long with better quality lives than people even a century ago. And while it’s a far cry from the futuristic computer utopia we were promised in the 1970s — that computers would reduce our working days to 4 hours or less with the same productivity and pay — the reality is that we’re required to get more done in the same amount of time simply because we can.
The plus side to this is that we can achieve more in each of those days than ever before — the trick is to make what you’re doing meaningful, if and where you can. And that’s exactly why I’m writing and working on building a career as a writer.
While exactly how I achieve that is still slightly nebulous (to use classic British understatement), I am working on creating a short story each week and submitting it to publishers, building my technical skills as a writer (not that you’d see it in this long and winding, self-indulgent ramble of a post), testing out how social networking can complement my activities, building a network of contacts and going to conferences. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating journey that I’ve just begun, and I’m enjoying all of it.
I received an excellent birthday present from the Open University last night: the results of the writing course I’ve recently completed. It’s a result with which I’m extremely pleased, and the tutor’s marking and personal comments are extremely encouraging. The tutor is also encouraging me to turn the piece I wrote for the assessment into a full book, so I suppose that’s high praise? She’s also encouraging me to take the next level creative writing course, which is the natural progression of this creative writing stream. It’s a year-long course costing over £600 and will require 600 hours of study (around 19 hours per week), so it’s not something I’m going to do without serious consideration. But I am serious considering it, and have until late Summer to decide.
