“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
― *false attribution* to L. Carroll see below for link

“We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.”
― Lewis Carroll

Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.
King Lear (2.7.70-4) – William Shakespeare

“So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you.”–Willy Wonka

A prompt that was ready to wear and with the perfect fit for me. What do I complain about the most? It is so difficult to find the one thing I complain about most without facing myself in the mirror. I have mastered complaints to the degree that I tend to laugh at my own temerity. Does no one listen to my rants? Well fie I say, who am I to be so important that the world need bend an ear. It is better to be silent if I have nothing valuable to add. Do my feet hurt and my eyes blur? Of course they do. I’ve been overworking them both for the past 60 years. How many steps would that be? How many pages turned when I should have been sleeping? They remember the boots and the landings, the sunlit skies and the sparkling daggers of winter suns on snow. But the thing I complain about most?

That would be that I must choose, and keep choosing, among the things that I enjoy. While I watch the sun rise once again and be grateful for the chance to create another day, I wonder with each sunset if it was to be my last. This is not new to me, this wondering. It has been the focus of a decades-long effort to keep it from ending my willingness to make plans and pursue future goals. It would be too easy to sit down and excuse my fears by reframing them into a false profundity of living in the moment. My complaint is that I cannot do everything I wish to do today. Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed but the burdens of living will undoubtedly be the same if I am here for tomorrow. I must eat. I must sleep. I must clean and I must wash dishes. I would rather play. I would rather create. I would rather stand in the sunshine and marvel at the silence suddenly broken by the thunder of birds’ wings as they launch themselves into the sky.

Even when I can make the time to create I still have to choose. I cannot write while I solder, or sing while I read a tale. Some of you may be able to do these things but I am not that talented. Each day I must choose and choose again. By the time the sun sets, the choices for the day have been laid like cobbles on a country road. I used to stay up late into the early morning because I didn’t want to lay the final stone for the day. If I am grumbling around my home. If I seem to resent my need for nourishment and the never-ending quest for a reasonably clean floor, it is not those things that are bothering me. It is instead, that rather than fresh bread, I would enjoy to follow a dream or an idea that rested like a butterfly in my mind.

But if I were to complain about these things rather than the dishes, the wash, or the dust, the world simply says it was my choice all along to go along with eating and breathing and that I would have done those other things if I really meant it. We all make choices they would say. We all have to give up things every day. We can do those things once we retire. We can travel later. We can pursue our dreams later. So I choose every day, knowing that some things left behind can never be retrieved. That is my complaint, though not in those words, but it will be heard in the clanking of the pans and my growl that echoes the vacuum as I watch the sun set and another stone laid on the way forward.

*https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/04/04/behinder/