Inexorable

inexorable (adj): not to be persuaded, moved, or stopped

The inexorable passage of time. When we're young, past the stage of imagination but still in search of freedom from some authority like our parents, or teachers, or a clock in a school classroom, it can never flow as fast as we'd like. Obligations are shackles, and fleeting freedom comes in the afternoon hangouts with friends, the sleepover all-nighters, the small escapes from the world of tests and grades.

Eventually, inexorably, we pay our due time, and find ourselves with an overwhelming amount of freedom. We choose a university. We choose a major. We choose a job offer. We choose partners, and hobbies, and diets, and most everything else about our lives. Not quite everything - the gravitational pull of friends and family and opportunity and other things is always noticeable.

I'm meandering a bit. I wanted to write something about my feelings on time's inexorability as a father and instead found myself linking it to choices somehow. Brains are weird.

Anyway, maybe I'll write more about the choice stuff later.

I just want to reflect on how some day, my son will stop building his Lego towers and magnet tile rockets. He'll stop arranging his trains and cars, one at a time, in some mysterious order I could never understand. He'll stop pushing my face one way or another and laughing when I pretend he's delivered a fatal wound. He'll stop clapping to himself when he completes an achievement understood only by himself.

I keep a daily journal of the special things he does. We take plenty of pictures of him and capture a lot of his silly whimsy. I carry him as much as he lets me, cursed and blessed with the knowledge I won't be able to do so forever.

I can't help but feel like nothing will be enough. Change, time, the passing of seasons - synonyms for an inexorable thing that is both beautiful and cruel.

Well, as we say in Japanese: しょうがない.