SLOWER

This morning, while things were quiet, I caught myself reading the back of the cereal box. I played the game of Sponge Bob following the right rope to find his buddy, Gary. In the spirit of a total regression into my second childhood, I also dug out the surprise in the cereal box, which was Sponge Bob, himself.

This simple action brought back a flood of childhood memories. I used to sit every morning at the breakfast table and fight my brothers for the right to read the back of the cereal box. I never got the prize but loved the games and puzzles. I believe this was the start of my love for reading.

The reading addiction started with the Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries, which introduced Perry Mason. I could not get enough. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were okay, but I was always looking for something more adult in content. When Perry Mason became a series, I would sell my soul to my Mom, to earn the privilege of watching each episode on TV. To this day, I still watch (and own) the original Perry Mason series.

Weird how the act of doing something so simple can trigger your past. It happens fast. You can’t control it. Things just flood into the mind. Fortunately for me, this flood was all happy memories. A time when people did not have electronics and yearned for the simple pleasures, like reading a cereal box.

Geez, I sound like my grandmother. “Remember when blah, blah, blah?” …. Yikes.

It’s true that aging can be dastardly, but aging is also wonderful. The breakneck pace that you’re sure you can’t live without while you are climbing in your 30s-50s, becomes not so important. I was born hyper-active. I have worked at a dizzying pace for decades. It’s never been too fast for me. I used to brag about how I could achieve the work of five people in any given day. Ha! The Hubris…

I am slowing down now and liking it. Sure, some of it is aging related, but mostly it’s by my choice. Aging is a blessing, waking me up to a different way of life. A better way. A slower way. It’s not that life itself is slowing down, it’s that I am slowing down. Work is still crazy. Family is still crazy. The dynamics and scenarios are the same, but I am not. It’s reading a cereal box at 5 in the morning, in the quiet on a Tuesday morning that made me realize…

It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just that I don’t care.