Maybe life tires you out that way.
I sat in my chair this morning – one sock on, one in my left hand – staring out the window for a good minute wondering what I was going to eat for breakfast. I had plenty of options, and I’m pretty regular about my breakfast meal; but I thought “maybe I should mix it up today.” This took far more time than it used to.
I wish there was a way to capture this so that a 30-year-old could understand. But then again, why should a 30-year-old bother himself with something like this? It’ll come. No worries there. No need to push this upon anyone. But it is an interesting line of thinking…at least to me. “When did I turn this corner where it takes an extra minute to make a decision like this?” Or how about, “Why do decisions like these matter so much now?”
When I was 30, I’d get up, grab whatever (I had not yet settled on my typical oatmeal etc. breakfast) and be done with it. I seldom gave it a moment’s thought, let alone minutes. Maybe it’s the familiarity of it? The drudgery of having made that breakfast decision nearly twice as many times as I’d done when I was 30 (maybe more – subtract the first few years of my life when my mother made the decision for me and we could be past the halfway mark)?
Or maybe it’s the thought that those decisions signify the ceaseless march of time to an inevitable end. That you’re about to launch into a day just like the one before. And the one before. And the one before.
Then again, does launching into my day matter that much? Perhaps it’s just that I know the day is going to be there for me whether I eat oatmeal or pancakes. No need to hurry, and as a matter of fact, a good minute wracking my brains for that decision might be just what I need to mix it up a bit.
Just so you know, in the end I had a bowl of cereal. Like I have a few thousand other times. Then a cup of coffee, finish off the day’s Bible-reading, on to another book, and more pondering. And of course, these minutes on the computer gathering my thoughts to ponder why I spent so much time pondering this morning.
Gotta love it when I mix it up like this every so often…