“Pinch me, pinch me, cause I’m still asleep. Please God tell me that I’m still asleep…” —Pinch Me by Barenaked Ladies

I’ve joked from time to time, when feeling especially exhausted, that I would love to pull a Rip Van Winkle. You know, hike up to a secluded cave in the forest, go to sleep for several decades, wake feeling refreshed and with the added benefit of having out-napped pretty much all of my problems. (For those who aren’t bookworms like myself and have never heard of Rip Van Winkle, it’s a classic American short story written by Washington Irving, I highly recommend it and Irving’s other works.)

The truth is, though, I feel like I’ve had the “Rip Van Winkle experience” in my comparatively short life already. The passage of time and changes to our world seem sped up to me, in an almost exponential way. Sometimes I look back in awe of my childhood and how it relates – or often doesn’t – to what my adulthood is like. I don’t describe this experience in relation to any of the trauma I endured, but more as a general consideration of the fact that life seems to be more “blink and you’ll miss it” than ever before.

Maybe I’m not pondering anything new at all here, as I pretend to stroke my whiskers like Rip had grown extensively on his chin during his long sleep. Maybe every person reaches a point in their life where they feel like they’re standing at a precipice, trying to rub the sleep from their eyes as if that will make their surroundings look more familiar, more like what they thought they knew. It is a curious thing that as children, we are often told that things will make more sense when we’re older, but it turns out that it all only becomes more ambiguous.

This week I’ve had some funny time-related conversations which have only enhanced this sense of preternatural existence. My daughter decided one morning on the way in to school that she was angry her father and I hadn’t invited her to our wedding (which of course took place a year and a half before she was born!). I had a random conversation with colleagues about our experiences relating to the events of 9/11, and how we can try to teach about that fateful day, should we manage to summon the strength (I’ve written previously about that here). Just this morning, I had a big laugh with a fellow teacher about trying to remember an algebra skill to teach a fourth grade student who was working on an advanced question, and realizing that we’ve been out of high school (when we learned said skill) about twice as long as that student has been alive!

It isn’t that I feel old, though that’s often the punchline with these sorts of tidbits, isn’t it? But no. It’s more that I feel too old for the amount of time I’ve been on this planet. I am too young to feel like butter scraped over too much bread, to quote one of my favorite hobbits (again, for the non-bookworms here: from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien). I’m barely to my mid-thirties, and already I feel so world-weary sometimes.

I suppose it is worth noting that Rip Van Winkle isn’t exactly a good character to wish to model oneself after. He’s a notably lazy dude in his story, agreeable and kind but not interested in doing work to support his family. Meanwhile, his wife is shrewish and overbearing, probably because she has to work overtime to make up for Rip’s lack of effort. When he finally wakes up from his very long sleep, he learns that his mean wife has died. The whole story is meant to be an allegory of the American colonies overcoming the tyranny of British rule. It’s not without its faults. Still, while I joke about acting like Rip just because, as someone who generally sleeps very poorly, a twenty-year nap sounds quite appealing, I think we can glean an important lesson from Rip as an example of what not to do.

Change is inevitable, and it really does feel like the world keeps spinning faster and faster. It can be exhausting at times to try to keep up. But the last thing we should do is sleep our time away. If change is inevitable, then the least we can do is try to steer it in a positive direction, and hope that by the time all is said and done, we will have more than our gray hairs to show for it.