I am Calvin in his old age

Calvin and Hobbes – my favourite comic strip. I read this yesterday – Calvin wonders aloud to Hobbes –

Why do people get slow, as they age?

You would think that knowing they have less time, they would like to hurry.

And when I get to be as old as my father, I would drive like a maniac.

Struck a chord in me. Driving through life like a maniac – Is that what I am trying to do, right now? Gathering knowledge, gaining experience, savouring whatever little pleasures I could …..in short, trying to live a full life. Though Diana Athill wags a finger at me, admonishing me not to take things too seriously …. I keep reading this passage of hers to stay in balance

There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success amounting to smugness.