Where Has the Time Gone?

Nowadays, seems like the reunions with friends of old are becoming too far and few in between. What is troubling personally is seeing how many children are popping up in the pictures of old acquaintances in various social networking sites. Usually meaning I'll end up getting an invitation for either a wedding or a baptismal... a clear sign that the days of innocent (well, actually, not-so-innocent) youth are slowly but surely coming to an end. It's only a matter of time until everyone I know is organizing children's birthday parties and I can't have any cake because I'm too old...

I just realized that I've forgotten more than I can remember. Looking back I could never figure out how I was able to argue that having public offices like government owned enterprises where best run by treating it like it was under the private sector and that the best public administrators are those who do more by doing less (i.e. steering instead of rowing). So many principles the theories I no longer recall where I could once write circles around them. Perhaps I should've saved those papers, might prove to be insightful despite that being of a different mindset.

It felt like yesterday that all the cares in the world where so distant that didn't warrant any attention. Used to be getting the paper or the schoolwork done was life and death. Concerns of the real world and what the future holds were more fleeting, and were shallow at best. There may be times that they pop up like that annoying guy who keeps asking you what's up even though you don't want anything to do with them, but still the episodes were short and felt like they were not canon to our personal continuity... until it's too late.

Regret is a sure sign that one is growing older. It's like a drug, we say we want to stop looking back and wishing things would be different, but we just can't help ourselves. We keep coming back, and we hate ourselves for doing so. Regret, as some may have surmised in the many ramblings prior to this entry, is a loathsome word that seems to brandish its dreary self more often than we wish. Whether we like to admit it or not, we all live through our regrets. It defines us in more ways than we think it does. It is a lot easier to be something we don't want to be than to be something that we want. Ambitions are more or less anchored by flights of fancy and going beyond possibility. Regrets and fears are usually based on a grounded rationale. Guess which one is more plausible?

People who say that they have no regrets are the people who've figured it out. They're not fooling themselves, they're not delusional. They understand the concept, and they embrace it. They don't kick themselves or sell themselves short every time they turn back to regret like a crack whore. They accept its part in reality and how in the end, success and failure, despite being polar opposites, follow they same laws of the universe: They are memories associated to them... and like most memories, they are destined to fade.