Every morning, very first thing, I wake up, sit up and take the three tablets that control my bipolar disorder. They are in a little box labelled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… They make me conscious that time is going by.

It’s the same at work. My job is to look at the dates on chilled food and put reduced stickers on anything that’s short-dated. Only last week, it seems, I was looking at the beginning of May and now it’s a fair way through June. Six weeks gone without noticing.

My husband said this morning, that he’s only just now beginning to feel his age – sixty-five. For many years, he says, he felt as if he were thirty-two. He got to thirty-two and just stopped there – he didn’t feel any older. But now he does: his body reminds him. I used to feel the same. Thirty-two seemed a good age: mature enough to be taken seriously, young enough to do anything I wanted. I was free from an unhappy marriage, living independently in London and life was good. Then I met my husband and life was even better.

We celebrated our twenty-seventh wedding anniversary last month. They’ve been happy years. Some difficulties, sadnesses and trials, yes, but mostly full of joy. Our girls are twenty-one and twenty-four and it seems only yesterday that they were little children. As somebody once told me when they were small, the days are long, but the years are short.

And age catches up. It used to be that one’s life expectancy was three score years and ten. Now we expect to live until we’re eighty in reasonably good health. I met a lady in church this week who is eighty-nine and still playing tennis. My mother, however, at eighty-nine walks with a walker and has had three serious falls. One thing thy have in common is their minds are still sharp. Many people at eighty-nine are living with dementia. I am so glad my mother is still with it.

I’m sixty-three and there are so many things I still want to do. I want to see Petra; I want to walk the Milford track in New Zealand; I want to take The Canadian train from Toronto to Vancouver. And I need to get a wiggle on before it is too late. My husband has his own dreams.

But with our younger daughter still at university and my husband still in work, we can’t do it just yet and I don’t want to be merely counting the hours down to his retirement. There must be something I can do in the meantime that’s worthwhile.

Then I remember my training for the Licensed Lay Ministry. That’s two years of hard study. In two years’ time – if we are given that long in good health – we can start to fulfil our dreams.

What dreams have you already achieved, and what dreams do you still want to fulfil? And will you realistically be able to?

Mary

A Moodscope member