I've always been fascinated by the perception of time passing. I remember as a six-year-old being told that Christmas would come around next year. Next year? Whoa, that's 1/6th of my entire life, that's practically forever! Talking with my grandparents, they speak of years as if they were days. And when you're talking about 1/86th of a lifetime, it's easy to see how little time a year can be.
Lynn and I celebrated our first year of marriage at the beginning of this month. At turns it is by far the longest and the shortest of years. So much has happened: we've moved, I took a new job, we've traveled far and wide, and adopted a cat—we've lived a full year.
And yet, has it really been that long? Has it really been an entire year since we gathered together with so many friends and family members? There are some folks reading this very post who I haven't seen in a year, surely not a whole year has gone by. I look at the ring on my finger. It's a bit dinged up, turns out I'm not very kind to my hands. But I still notice it, I still fiddle with it. It still feels new.
It was with this mix of feelings about how much and how little time has passed that Lynn and I decided to spend the weekend of our first anniversary back in the area where we were married. We stayed in the same hotel as our wedding weekend, and had dinner at the restaurant where our rehearsal dinner was held. We even went up to visit the place where our ceremony was held and took a few pictures.
It put things in perspective. A year. Not a long year, not a short year, but a good year. A year full of change and excitement, and not a small amount of struggle and learning. A year in which we learned what it means to make a life from two, and from which we can go confidently into the next. There will be a time when this whole year will seem like a day. But it will always be a day worth remembering, full of years of good experiences.
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