Summerdale, AL - Time's A Wastin'

When we walk, putting in our daily miles, we both have lot of time to think. Sometimes, we talk but not too often. There’s not much to say since we’ve just spent the last 24 hours together. So, of course, there’s plenty of time to think. Me, my thoughts are usually pretty down to earth, nothing very deep. Sometimes I think of what I’m going to cook for dinner when we get back to the RV after our walk (about time I thought of this). Other times I’m thinking of the travel plans we have, where we’d like to stop and what we’d like to see. Other times I’m thinking of what I’m going to do in the evening. Nothing very deep here. No great cosmic thoughts about the universe. But, sometimes niggling at the back of my mind through all this, especially the trip planning, is the thought that I have only so much time left in my life. Even though I keep adding to my lists of places to go and things to see, I realize that I will always be adding to this list but the time for subtracting from it is dwindling.

Sometimes I feel like the Crosby, Stills and Nash song - that I have only so much time left in my life and there’s so much more to see and do.

Look around me now, I can see my life before me

Running rings around the way it used to be

I am older now, I have more than what I wanted

But I wish that I had started long before I did

And there's so much time to make up everywhere you turn

Time we have wasted on the way

So much water moving underneath the bridge

Let the water come and carry us away

I often wish that we could have started RV’ing sooner, that we could have decided much earlier that this was the life we wanted to live. However, we had family responsibilities (though ‘responsibilities’ makes it sound so cold) and didn’t want to reorder our lives any other way. We didn’t start to RV until my mother died in 2008 and we didn’t become full-timers until Gary’s father died in early 2013. Could we have done this any sooner? Absolutely not. We wanted to be there for our parents. They made us what we were and what we were was two kids that wanted to help our parents as much as we could.

So, even though I loved being there with our parents and have no regrets for the time we spent with them, somehow I do regret that we won’t get done all we’d like to get done. That’s where I get back to the CSN song, and feel as if somewhere along the way we have wasted time that we will never recover. But, as I will continue to diligently add to my list, I will also perform careful triage on that list: choosing those things that I want to do more than the others. I suspect that on the list of things we want to do, those things that we have checked off will be smaller than those we have not. But, on the other hand, shouldn’t that be the way it is? Shouldn’t we always have a list that we are adding to, a list of things we haven’t checked off yet?