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Here’s a word for us: aphorism.
Well, technically that’s not quite right, but stay with me for a moment. It’s the idea captured in one of those tidy little sayings about life—the kind that feels simple until it suddenly hits you square between the eyes. You know the one: the routine of everyday life feels endless, but the accumulation of those days—the years—somehow feels shockingly short.
Monday stretches out like a long country road. Tuesday follows close behind, carrying grocery lists, phone calls, laundry piles, and whatever small catastrophe happens to crop up before lunch. Day after day feels like it’s taking its sweet time marching across the calendar. And yet somehow, when you look up, an entire decade has slipped by like it had somewhere more important to be.
My youngest brother and I were talking about this very thing just the other day. Now, he happens to be living in that peculiar state of euphoria that occurs immediately after discovering that your child has produced a child of their own. That’s right—baby brother is now a grandpa.
Yes, the same kid who once needed supervision to operate a toaster now has a grandchild.
Life is nothing if not entertaining.
The joy is practically spilling out of him. It’s the kind of happiness that leaks into every conversation, every story, every passing remark. Grandparenthood has apparently unlocked a brand-new emotional setting somewhere between pride, amazement, and a slightly bewildered “How on earth did this happen?”
It’s contagious.
Even to an older sister separated by years, life stages, and the differences in worldview. For a few precious moments during that conversation, all the usual distances faded away. We weren’t navigating adulthood or responsibilities or the complicated logistics of grown-up lives. We were simply siblings again—standing together at the edge of another family milestone, marveling at how the timeline of our lives had quietly rolled forward.
Moments like that are funny things. They act as little catalysts for remembering and reconnecting. They pull old memories out of storage and dust them off: childhood kitchens, backyard adventures, family arguments that seemed enormous at the time and now feel charmingly ridiculous.
And suddenly the years rearrange themselves in your mind.
The older I get, the more I feel the strange truth behind that little life observation—whatever the proper word for it may be. The days can feel long. Sometimes very long. But the years? The years have an alarming tendency to sprint past when no one is looking.
And every once in a while, a new baby arrives, a brother becomes a grandfather, and you realize that time hasn’t just been passing. It’s been quietly building a whole new generation while we were busy living the days.