The Olympics & Life’s Time

I don’t usually spend a lot of time watching the Olympics, either summer or winter, but this year I have been spending time in a hotel room, so I have been watching.  Gymnastics is one of the sports that I like to watch.  The last women’s team that really sticks out in my memory was the team called the “Magnificent Seven” with Shannon Miller, Dominique Moceanu, Dominique Dawes, Kerri Strug, Amy Chow, Amanda Borden, and Jaycie Phelps.  I was really surprised, when I looked them up, to see that they are now all in their 40s!  I couldn’t believe that they were in the 1996 summer games which was 28 years ago!  That’s crazy.  I would have thought that they competed much more recently than that.  This makes me think about the fact that the past never seems as long ago in years as it actually is.  When time in the past is part of our own life experience, it doesn’t seem any less real than time that is more recent.  This is the way I feel anyway.  The thing that seems the most real about the passage of years and decades is how quickly they go by.  Realizing that something that seems more recent, actually took place 28 years ago is a reminder that time does keep slipping into the future very quickly.  I am reminded of the importance, particularly at this point in my life, of taking time to slow down and prioritize devoting my time to things that I enjoy and want to do.  The years won’t stop flying by and if we want to do the things that we enjoy that matter the most, we have to decide not to prioritize other things that we think are important, but don’t truly matter as much.  Time won’t wait for everything else to always be done first.  We have to stop and consider what we are spending our time doing, and whether or not these things truly matter enough to be eating up our time.  I just really seem to be feeling this right now.  We start off with the right attitude when we are young, but then as adults, we learn to prioritize our responsibilities and whatever things we have been led to believe are important.  It takes growing older to make us realize that our focus should be not only be on our responsibilities and the things that we are conditioned to believe are important, but on what truly matters the most to us as individuals.