Meditations on Time
Here I am, at age 78, seemingly surrounded by stories about time. These stories naturally have a way of turning my thoughts toward how short my own time may be.
I just reread a novel in which every adult on the planet receives a box containing a string that reveals exactly how long they will live. And I’m recalling the television comedy about a moral accounting system that tracks a person’s life here on Earth. Finally, there’s the recent film that imagines we get to choose the precise form our eternity will take.
I did not set out to braid these snippets of our popular culture together. They braided themselves. At this age, time insists on being the subject.
The reminders are constant. Obituary columns, for one. My personal calendar, for another, which now includes far more medical appointments than it once did. Routine blood work. MRI, CT and DEXA scans. Follow-ups, with each visit carrying the distinct possibility that this will be the one where the doctor pauses too long before speaking. Most of the time the news is ordinary. “See you in six months.” But the suspense never quite disappears.
In Nikki Erlick’s 2022 novel The Measure, a mid-life character suggests that a string long enough to reach age eighty would count as good news. When I read that passage, I felt a small jolt. Eighty no longer feels like a distant horizon. It is a number that is uncomfortably close.
If I opened my box today, I would automatically have a long string. The real question would be: how much longer? A year? Five years? Ten? More? Though If I died today, surely no one would lament that I was gone before my time.
All of which leads to other concerns. How many more years would I want if they are shadowed by increasing pain — or other physical or mental decline? Longevity, at this stage, is not automatically the goal. There are conditions.
The Good Place, the four-season television series originally airing on NBC (and now available on Peacock), begins with a moral scoring system; every human action or interaction earns positive or negative points. An endless array of cosmic accountants supposedly keeps track of these tallies someplace up there in the sky, and when you die your final count decides your destiny. It is morality, and judgment day, rendered as a dispassionate spreadsheet.
At 78, that premise feels less like satire and more like a quiet audit. I find myself reviewing my own ledger. Have I been good? Not necessarily accomplished. Nor productive. But good?
My entries must be mixed. I have lived and loved imperfectly. I have hurt people I did not intend to hurt. There are relationships that did not endure. Some ended gently. Others did not. Even now there is sadness attached to those chapters, a sense that certain conversations might have gone differently if I had been wiser, braver or simply more skilled.
I sometimes wonder whether those endings count against me, or whether they merely show that I kept trying to connect and sometimes failed.
The show ultimately dismantles its point system, though. Life, it suggests, is far too entangled for simple math. Growth matters more than totals; it matters more than being flawless.
What lingers for me now is the series’ ending. Even paradise becomes hollow if it stretches on forever. In the final season, the characters are offered an exit. They step through one last door when they feel complete. Eternity with no ending, the show suggests, flattens meaning.
So, I wonder: How, ultimately, will I measure my existence? Will there ever be a time when will I feel complete?
Those questions followed me into the 2025 film Eternity, now on Apple TV, where humanity is invited to choose the form one’s forever will take. The idea sounds appealing at first. Pick your paradise. A tropical beach, for example. Perfect weather. Endless calm.
But what would that mean after a thousand years? Ten thousand? How could any single scene, no matter how beautiful, sustain significance without limit? Without scarcity?
Part of what makes a late-life conversation more vivid is precisely that it may not be repeated endlessly. Scarcity is what gives weight to life’s ordinary moments.
If I knew the precise length of my string, maybe I would live differently. I might rush to repair what remains frayed. Or I might grow cautious, conserving energy. Uncertainty leaves me in between. Aware of the limit, but not of its measure. Isn’t it that uncertainty that keeps life from becoming either frantic or complacent?
If there is a ledger somewhere, I hope it records effort. That it shows I kept revising myself. That I tried to mend what I could. That I did not stop growing simply because the horizon drew closer.
I am not eager to open the box. And I am not certain I want a tropical eternity with no horizon. I only know that the ticking is audible now. Doctor visits. Quiet evenings. Old relationships to ponder. Meditations on time.
Age 78. Still adding to the ledger.
Poetry Selection: The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-Mary Oliver
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
I went into A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), recently made available on Netflix, with absolutely no sense of the storyline. Sometimes that’s the best way to encounter a film. With no expectations to manage and no trailer logic to undo, you’re free to simply watch and see what happens. What I found was a fantasy-based romantic comedy that takes itself rather seriously at times, moves at its own pace, and ends up having more to say than I expected. I recommend it.
The film opens at a generically named “Car Rental Agency,” where David (Colin Farrell) encounters two unusually quirky employees, Kevin Kline as the Mechanic and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the Cashier. David is on his way to a friend’s wedding. The car he rents, a 1994 Saturn SL, comes equipped with a GPS unit that quickly establishes itself as a character in the story.
At the wedding, David locks eyes with Sarah (Margot Robbie), and the two engage in flirtatious, slightly offbeat banter at the reception. At one point, Sarah semi-seriously asks David to marry her, a moment that clearly unsettles him. What is he to make of this unconventional woman? When Sarah then asks him to dance, he declines. Later, she leaves with another man.
Driving home, the GPS asks David if he’d like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey. He agrees, and with that, the film’s fantasy premise is underway. David is soon instructed to take the next exit and order a fast-food cheeseburger. Inside the restaurant, he discovers Sarah, also eating a cheeseburger. When they leave, Sarah’s car, another Saturn from the same rental company, refuses to start, and David’s GPS instructs him to offer her a ride. She accepts, and the two begin sharing the rest of the drive home.
From there, the film settles into its central rhythm. The GPS directs David and Sarah to a series of roadside stops that turn out to be doors, both literal and metaphorical. Behind each door lies not so much a place as a moment in time. These episodes are drawn from the characters’ pasts, and what’s striking is how matter-of-factly they accept what’s happening. There is only a modicum of astonishment. David and Sarah step into these moments as if the past were still physically present, waiting to be revisited.
One door, for example, takes them to David’s high school on the night he is starring in the class musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He plays the lead role of J. Pierrepont Finch, with Sarah and his parents watching from the audience. During the show, David relives a painful romantic rejection, confessing his feelings to a costar offstage and then, in an impulsive moment, temporarily derailing the production by confronting her onstage with blunt observations about the life she will go on to lead.
In a later scene, they stop at a decaying roadside billboard with an opening that leads into a café. Inside, two conversations unfold at once. David’s former fiancée presses him for an explanation about the end of their engagement, while Sarah revisits the collapse of a relationship with a former boyfriend. Eventually, the two conversations merge, with all four characters seated at the same table. David and Sarah are given an unusually revealing view of how each has behaved in earlier relationships, and both are forced to acknowledge their own intimacy issues.
By this point, it’s very clear that this big, bold, beautiful journey is less about time travel than about self-examination. As David and Sarah move through these episodes together, the focus remains on how they respond to what they learn about one another. They watch. They ask important questions. They engage in remarkable amounts of self-disclosure. The film allows these moments to unfold slowly. The pace worked for me, though I can see why others might find it trying. This is not a movie in a hurry.
What the film seems most interested in is not whether David and Sarah will end up together, but what it means for two people to really see one another. By the time you’ve lived a while, introductions are never clean. Everyone arrives with baggage, earlier versions of themselves still visible around the edges. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey makes that idea concrete, and in doing so, captures something emotionally recognizable.
I was willing to go along with the unlikely premise and the deliberate pacing largely because the performances are so grounded. The connection between Farrell and Robbie builds through pauses, glances, shared silences and, often, moments of unusually deep honesty. That connection feels earned, not manufactured.
What stayed with me afterward was not a particular scene or line of dialogue, but the film’s underlying suggestion that not every meaningful encounter has to resolve into something permanent. Some meetings matter because they clarify where you are, or because they briefly align two lives that have been moving along separate tracks. That idea resonated with me more than any conventional romantic payoff might have.
Not everyone will be taken with this film. It asks for patience and a tolerance for ambiguity. It treats human connection as something provisional and fragile, shaped by timing and circumstance, and often understood only in retrospect.
By the end, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey felt less like a romance than a meditation on how lives intersect, diverge, and occasionally overlap just long enough to matter. For me, that made the journey worth taking.
What Is It All About?
I am now in my 77th year and quite frequently, in this mostly-retired life I’m living, I wonder how to make the most meaning of my remaining days. I say “mostly retired” because back in 2019, after five years with no earned income, I decided to seek part-time work that would supplement my various and sundry (i.e., relatively-modest) retirement-income streams. So, in the last five years, and because I have a wide range of skills, I have worked three successive, different jobs on our local community college campus. It has been a valuable experience, so far, and keeps both my mind and body active.
Retirement, though, is nothing like I imagined – that is, if I thought about it much at all. I never really did have a coherent “retirement strategy,” as we are encouraged to do. Rather, my approach seemed to be: to work as long as I can and then see where I was in “old age.” You would be right in concluding that this is not really the most prudent game plan. And, as it turned out, I spent a considerable portion of my life pursuing multiple academic degrees, which significantly cut into my ability to put away any kind of really-comfortable, old-age nest egg. (Student loans played a big part in that, I have to admit; I was paying them off until age 66. It seems I missed the whole “forgiveness” scenario by about three decades.)
The bottom line here is: I have found this time of life to be quite problematic. Despite the fact that I am working part time, getting up in the morning and finding purpose has been a real issue. Questions such as: what am I doing with my life? and what have I done with my life” keep seeping into my consciousness. I keep wondering about the value I have added to the universe during my younger years, and I am especially questioning the value of my life now. As always, I am asking: what’s it all about?
Most people would say: love. But it seems that has mostly passed me by this time around.
Soundtrack Suggestion
What’s it all about Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed
You’re nothing, Alfie
(“Alfie” – Burt Bacharach)
A Swift Conversion
It would seem I’m in love again. Well, sorta, anyway. No, I don’t have another significant-other in my life. I don’t know if that will ever happen again. As it turns out, I have recently become rather taken with a young female pop star.
Nope, it’s not Billie Eilish. And I said pop star, so no, it’s not Caitlin Clark either. But both of those would be rather good guesses, as I have, of late, become fans of both.
Perhaps you’ve heard of my new interest: Taylor Swift. Ring a bell? Anybody? Well, I suspect you have, so here’s a little bit of the story.
It wasn’t more that maybe four or five months ago that I mentioned to a friend that this Taylor Swift person sure is in the news a lot these days. I had become more and more aware of her with the furor over The Eras Tour. And of course, this was during the NFL season, so Ms. Swift’s involvement with Kansas City Chiefs’ Travis Kelce was generating quite the buzz. Still, I confessed, despite the apparent fame and fortune of this very popular musician, I could not name even one song of hers. Well, my friend is a grandmother of two pre-adolescent girls so is slightly more contemporary-pop-culture aware than I am in this regard; she indicated that she knew one song: “Shake it Off.” So, for the first time, I watched the music video of that song, and said, “yeah, I guess that’s rather cute.” (It was very well produced, I do admit.)
And then, I went on about my life.
Subsequently, of course, there was all the news about Kansas City getting into the Super Bowl and would Taylor Swift be able to make it to the game, given that she was performing a concert in Japan the night before? Such controversy: holy crap! Well, of course, you probably know that not only did she make it to the game (the perks of having a private jet!), but the Chiefs beat the 49ers in overtime – and the game was watched by an increasingly large female TV audience hoping to catch a glimpse of Taylor in her private stadium suite.
Still, I was amused, but rather unmoved.
But then, things took a turn. At some point a few days ago, someone (sorry, I don’t recall who) on Facebook posted a link to a NPR Tiny Desk Concert. And I watched. This session was recorded over four years ago, in October 2019: showcasing a slightly-younger Taylor (can I now call you by your first name?), without the frills of a music video or the glitter while playing to an arena of tens-of-thousands. She played four tunes as, she said, “how the songs sounded when I first wrote them” (i.e, acoustic versions, two on guitar, two on piano). I had never heard these tunes before, of course, though it now seems obvious, given some further research, that most of the rest of the civilized world has. In the comments section, a 70-year-old guy from Oregon (not me) wrote, “I now see the appeal, the truly evident talent and most of all… the genuineness of her personality, and the deservedness of the accolades she has garnered.”
What especially caught my attention was the final song she performed, entitled, “All Too Well.” Right away, it became obvious that this was what could be definitively called a “breakup song.” Arggghhhhh! It totally socked me in the gut. And I immediately agreed with the person in the comments section, as I said to myself, “ah, now I get it.” She is a truly engaging as a person and writes lyrics that speak deeply to the human experience. No wonder she has the immense following she enjoys.
I love you, Taylor. (Call me.)
(And I still cannot name a single Beyoncé song. Sorry ‘bout that.)
Here is today’s Soundtrack Suggestion:
Adieu
Teller was not so much bereft as he was stunned; although, he admitted, this was accompanied by a healthy dose of relief. He was aware that he should be grieving, as would be normal under such circumstances. Perhaps the immense sense of fatigue that he was feeling, down to the core of his being, was a symptom of his sadness.
The relationship that he had been involved in for five years was now officially over. Given that he had invested so much of his life in this one person, it qualified as one of the major liaisons of his life. But now, it was, finally: kaput.
Not that this should be a big surprise. In fact, anyone with a lick of sense would have predicted this outcome for a coupling with such a turbulent and chaotic dynamic. The on-again/off-again nature had been truly maddening.
Teller and Gwendolyn had met online and had their first date on her 65th birthday in 2019. He was 71 at the time and hoping to meet his last love. However, despite their mutual attraction, from very early on differences over fundamental values were evident.
Consequently, there were oh many instances of painful conflict along the way. And it did not end well, with Gwen sending a final, distancing text: “… and please do not contact me again.”
Yes, Teller was stunned. And yet, bound to honor Gwendolyn’s wish.
Adieu: perhaps to his last love.
