Friday 4 May 2012

Passage of time

This week I've had two occasions to pause and think about the passage of time.

The first occasion was when a friend posted our class photo on Facebook and I realised that it was taken nearly twenty years ago. I scanned the faces and realised that a lot of them I'd lost touch with... the good thing was that the photo helped re-connect some connections.

You leave school, you go to University, you move around a lot. Addresses over those few years change regularly, and things get lost and left behind (remember this was the days before the prevalence of internet and keeping everything on computers!). Classmates got married and changed their names - no wonder I couldn't find them!

It was strange looking at all those fresh faces in the early 90s... with no idea where the path of life was going to take them... the me in that photograph certainly had a very different career path planned from the one I ended up on!

It is great to catch up with so many old friends again though, and now the possibility of a 20 year school reunion is being mentioned (good grief!).

The second occasion was when I realised that this week marked 10 years since my diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. This surprised me slightly as it didn't seem like a decade had passed. That certainly is not a path anyone would choose - but I feel that I'm at last getting to manage my work and life in a satisfactory manner and live up to that old maxim "I have MS, but MS doesn't have me."

Looking back 20 years makes one wonder what the next 20 years will bring...