Numerology

Age is just a number, I'm told. That's true, I suppose, though that statement really underestimates the importance of numbers in civilization. Numbers are beautiful, horrible things, bursting with knowledge and meaning, holding in their cruel grasp the capacity for extreme reduction, and perhaps, the very secrets of the universe. Numbers, even when you attach the idea that they are "just" numbers, all tell stories, both wonderful and frightening.

Try as we might, we cannot escape that our lives are measured by numbers, that we can quantify the length of our own existence; as long as we are still lucid, we will always attach a number to the time we have spent in this world, and we are doomed to constantly reflect on what the changing of every number means. There are expectations attached to ages, societal norms that are more or less carried out despite our protestations in earlier numbers. There are goals that we've set for ourselves, both accomplished and abandoned. There are ways that we expect our body to act, or we expect ourselves to act, appropriate to the number of candles on our birthday cake. We think of what we've left behind along with the obsolete ages, the things we've outgrown, or the stuff we've forgotten how to do.

And we think of what's supposed to be coming next.

And there's everything and nothing, the thinking as pointless as it is unavoidable. We cannot see the future, and the past cannot be revisited. All we have, in the end, is a number, and whatever meaning we choose to give it.

For what it's worth: goodbye 25, you were quite good to me.

Hello, 26. Let's give you a good story to tell.