27,375

   Those of you who follow my writing with some degree of regularity will know that for some reason I have become fixated on age and time. Yes. I am getting older, as we all do, living each day, just one day at a time. That appears to be the way the system works. But what I have come to discover and understand with a bit more clarity is that it is not necessarily how many days we live but how we live each day.

   Like many of you, I am going to assume, I get a number of posts on my Facebook page about living each day to the fullest. I do not know how or why they appear as they do. I can usually count on several of these posts to appear throughout the day. Sometimes they make sense. It depends upon the time of the day or the type of day I am having. Sometimes they seem a bit silly. But the ones that seem to apply to my state of mind at that particular moment can be a bit scary. Is my computer looking over my should. Can it read my mind? Does it know what I am thinking because I have just been perusing the pages of Amazon, looking at items I don’t really need?

   At this moment, for example, the following popped up on my screen…” Stop thinking about the limitations and start thinking about the possibilities.” Ok. Where did that come from?

   Many of the posts focus on the present and the future and credit the past to nothing more than the opportunity to learn from your mistakes. I believe that reflecting on the past can serve as a guide for the future but can also be a storehouse for many enjoyable memories and experiences that make us the person we are on this particular day. And yes, there will be both good ones and bad ones.

   Each new day is the next entry into what will become “a yesterday” and how we live today, what we think about, what we do, how we act and what we accomplish will be logged into another day of life’s experiences.

   The past few weeks, months and years have given us a great deal to think about. It has been a life quite different than I experienced growing up in the 50s and 60s.

   Gasoline at the local gas station was about 25 cents a gallon, until they would have a gasoline war and then the price might drop to 17 cents. Many stores and businesses were closed on Sundays so that family members could go to church together and then maybe spend some quality time enjoying family time together. A haircut was $1.25 and a bottle of coke was 10 cents.

   If I needed to get across town, I could go to the corner and pick up the neighborhood bus and within a couple of minutes be at my friend’s house where his mom had just baked some cookie and with a glass of milk we would be set for the afternoon to watch the black and white tv and sing along with Howdy Doody. And if we were really lucky, we might even go to the local movie theater to see a Disney movie.

   If I needed to make a phone call I would find the nearest phone booth, drop a quarter into the slot and dial the number, not by pushing buttons but by using a dial. I made a lot of mistakes dialing numbers back then.

   Schools were vastly different back then also. No computers. Pencils, pens and yellow or white paper with blue lines were how we communicated. And I felt very safe going to school, although every once and awhile we would have what were called air raid drills where we would hid under the desk in case there was an air attack by some foreign country.

   As each day passed life changed. The price of gasoline went up. Today’s price $4.59. Food at the grocery store became more expensive. One grapefruit is currently $1.23.   And shows on television and at the movies have become more violent and sometimes downright scary.  So what does all this mean?

   27,375 is the number of days I have been alive and the likelihood of living for another 27,375 is not going to happen. But during that time I used each ‘yesterday experience’ to prepare for ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow.’ Our world, as it exists today, is presenting us with some challenging times. But as we have done in the past, if we learn from our past mistakes, failures and successes we can get through these challenging times.

   And about the computer being able to read my mind???