Alas! No Time!

I have suddenly realised that I will run out of time! It occurs to me every day,  every day I run out of time, and every day is a microcosm of the inevitable course of my entire life - my days shall end before I've oriented myself properly for actually using them. I will have turned the last pages of the user manual, and will be informed that the machine must now be returned to sender.

I have come too late to a study of history to have it properly aid me in my understanding of the world now, although just in time to have it consume me with curiosity and retrospective fantasy. Too late to  contribute substantially to its continual discovery and analysis.

I have come too late to geography and cartography to have it properly inform my understanding of current politics, of the oddities of social borders, and behaviour. Too late are maps of distracting interest to me, every place-mark a point of infinite area, a fractal point into which I never cease to want to zoom.

I have come too late to the realisation that my passion for engineering was primarily the joy of the discovery of new concepts, the tantalising potential of microscopic mechanisms, and not the drive to actually produce something.

I have come too late to literature to eat more than a morsel of the delicacies spread before humanity.  I have come too late to write truly about anything other than my infinitesimal sliver of direct experience.

I have come too late to music, that abstract perfection that good poetry tends toward; too late to learn to sing, too late to learn to play more than Fur Elise on the piano.

Oh alas poor me! But maybe not! Perhaps if I am strict with myself - abstain from frivolous depth-less entertainment on TV, abandon hundreds of distracting go-nowhere projects, establish a more rigorous daily routine... Perhaps, in short, if I fundamentally change my attitude to the every-day, I will one day be able to sing Mary Had a Little Lamb in tune.

But the majority of the world's literature is doomed to languish un-appreciated by Me; the world will be deprived of the truth of how it feels to sit between my myopic eyes and greying pate; I'll never farm potatoes for a living; I'll never play water polo professionally; I'll never climb Everest, or sit in a clearing of forest in South East Asia that inspired Conrad to conjure Lord Jim.

I'll die yearning, striving, wishing, hoping, planning, and realising I'm too bludy late again.

Thank heavens for that.