The final home series for the Lexington Legends starts today, and I find, from my perspective, that the season seems to end more quickly, as the years pass. It’s a poignant reminder that time is a matter of perception and experience; the longer we live, therefore, the shorter the coming years seem. And yet, in our minds, our earliest memories seem eternal.
When we’re kids, even a day seems like it will last forever. As teenagers, time seems to move just a bit faster, though often not fast enough to assuage our impatience with it.
As young adults, life gets a lot busier. Jobs. Kids. Work. Married life, for some of us. And we start to learn that, as it’s beginning to pass at an ever-increasing rate, we don’t have the ability to fit in everything we want to do.
Middle age arrives, and we’re gobsmacked by how time seems to fly, now. From this point, we find ourselves “wondering where all that time went”. As we continue to get older and older, days seems like minutes. Weeks seem like days. And the years are gone, before we know what hit us.
I say all this because these players are experiencing what may be some of their most memorable moments. They’re in the early days of their professional lives. Some of them are advancing up the chain, some are released after their first year. Still others make it all the way to the majors. They’re all young, inexperienced with life’s ups and downs, comparatively, to most of us. But as they get older, and the time seems to speed by them, they’ll remember these days fondly; even the bad times will seem, somehow, bittersweet.
And though they’ve learned, as they’ve grown older, how time is ever-fleeting and intangible, in a corner of their minds, those diamonds and pearls will last forever.
