A couple of weeks ago marked my 20th anniversary with the Ontario Public Service.
Twenty years.
It doesn’t feel as though I’ve toiled here for 20 years, which is merciful considering I have another 14 to go before I can entertain the thought of retirement (at least with a pension. I entertain the thought all the time, otherwise). But what is it supposed to feel like, exactly? Twenty years.
In 1992 I heard that the Toronto Sun (trash that it is) was celebrating it’s 20th anniversary, having begun publishing in 1972. I thought “that doesn’t make sense. 1972 wasn’t 20 years ago”. But it was. I just had no sense of what the passage of 20 years felt like. It felt like nothing, like just a couple of years.
And it still feels that way.
We’re hurtling through space at hundreds of miles an hour (how many hundreds depends on where exactly on the earth’s surface you’re standing). But we don’t notice. Apparently we’re hurtling through time the same way.
I wondered if people who have more visible accomplishments are able to track time better. People who can see their past scattered with the art they created, the buildings they built , the books they wrote… But I doubt it somehow. I think we’re built to largely ignore the passage of the years. We deal with life in smaller, more manageable, chunks. Days, seasons. And they always cycle back to the beginning again. You start in the morning, work your way through night and the next thing you know you start over again. You start in Spring, work your way through summer then fall then the darkness of winter and you are right back where you started again. No wonder we don’t realize when twenty years go by.
Soon I’ll be given 4 leather coasters by my employer in thanks for the 20 years of dedication to the job. I suppose that’s because they realize that if you’ve been working here for 20 years you’ve probably started to drink.
