The silent scream of getting old

There is a certain time in your life when you suddenly become very invested in how old Wilford Brimley was when he made Cocoon, and while he was playing someone vastly older than he was, there is some existential shock when you hit that age. 

Another moment like this that has stuck in my brain for decades is when Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise takes note of how old he is getting in the first TNG movie, and that he has come to terms with the idea that there were more days behind him than ahead of him, and I almost certainly crossed that particular threshold sometime in the post decade, and it is giving me the shits, man.  

Especially since it's been a blink of an eye since Malcolm McDowell killed Captain Kirk in that film, and it's somehow 30 years later. It's certainly comforting to see Sir Patrick still out there doing his thing in the X-Men, but he is much, much closer to that end he talked about with Deanna Troi, and it doesn't feel like he should be.

I do like being in my fifties, I'm far more well-adjusted and self-confident and plain old happier than ever before. I love my family and we just moved into our new home, after a lifetime of renting. I still love my day job, and while the world is in a general spiral of shit, all is right with the world around me.  

But it's also August already and I do feel time slipping through my fingers, like sloppy wet sand. And sometimes the sheer rage at how fast it is sliding by makes me want to scream in some kind of never-ending howl.

That's normal, right? One thing I can rely on in this uncertain world is that when it comes to aging, we're all in the same boat. We all feel life slipping away, even as we try to hold on. Time is a merciless bastard, and we all age together, and we're all silently screaming about it, and pushing it to the back of our minds so that we can just get through the day.

Even Jean-Luc Picard feels it, and his lack of a biological family gives more weight to the doubts he feels, even as his considerable accomplishments are immortalised in history. He'll be okay. After all, he's just a fictional character, and will live on long after I've merged with the infinite, which I still hope remains a long, long way off.