It’s nice to exist.

I was driving around in the rain earlier.  I had just left my friend’s house.  A friend who lives five minutes from my house.  It would’ve made the most sense to go home–temperatures were just above freezing.  The roads had been sanded, but really it was the fog that was the main hassle. 

But I didn’t feel like going.

It was nothing dramatic.  It was just that it was a little after one in the morning and I felt like singing.  The car with the radio was the place to be, not the house with the sleeping family.

Driving around the town where I grew up.  Feeling introspective.  Up roads my school bus used to rumble each morning.  Down streets where things happened to me–things that shaped me. 

Just before I left my friend’s house, the friend who has been my friend longer than anyone, I said to her, “It’s weird to start this new year.  So much has changed.  Is changing.”  This past year was one of struggles and then realizations, and this coming one…I sense it needs to be one of action.  Which is exciting, but it’s also a lot of responsibility.  Part of me just wants to be lazy, but probably that’s the part of me that’s afraid. 

Anyway.  All I really am getting at here in all this sentimentality is that Keith Urban is an existential genius.  I was listening to the country radio station.  I was driving past the softball fields and then past the entrance to my elementary school.  And the station was airing an interview with him.  The interviewer was talking about how Urban moved to Nashville seventeen years ago.  And how that sounds like so long ago, considering that Urban’s only been really big on the scene for the past eight years or so. 

Then the interviewer asked him if it felt like it’d been that long.  Urban said, “Yes.  It does.”  And they were talking about how time goes fast, and that as we get older time seems to go even faster.  And this is when Keith Urban blew my mind.  He said that when we’re 10-years-old, one year is one tenth of our lives–and that’s a lot.  Then, when we’re 20-years-old, one year is half that, and at 30 years, even less of our lives.  So it stands to reason that years feel faster.  “It’s relative,” he said.

And that was when they stopped playing the clip from the interview.  It was as though the interviewer had gotten more than he’d bargained for–he was looking for the regular fluff and had ended up with kinda sorta intelligent stuff. 

So, yeah.  Time.  I intend to make the most of it this coming year as we all float through it.  I’ll love; I’ll laugh; I’ll cry.  I’ll stay true to myself.  I’ll take action.  I’ll drive through the rain singing along to the country radio.

But for now I’ll go to sleep.

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