Thinking About Milestones

As Sojourner's Song approaches 200 posts and 10,000 hits, it has me thinking about milestones. Honestly, milestones leave me conflicted. The rugged rationalist in me insists that numerically interesting moments in the linear progression of time ought to remain completely irrelevant. (Why should a certain day be special just because it happens to be the first day of the year? What's the bloody difference between visitor 10,000 and visitor 9,999?) The romantic part of me, however, shyly admits the whimsical appeal of New Year's resolutions, turning 21, and that magic moment twice a day when your digital watch reads 11:11:11. (Don't tell me you've never stopped what you're doing to see the numerals align. I know you have. It's positively mesmerizing.)

The problem with milestones, as I see it, is that they - like deadlines - never seem to give you time to observe them properly. They start approaching, and you feel nervous, and then they're here, and you don't know what to do, and then they're gone, and you're relieved. Time grinds along, exactly like a giant grist mill, and always our frenzied, last-minute attempts at sentimentality come up short. This can be extremely frustrating for those who very badly want to see the moment handled with the sensitivity and emphasis it deserves. This frustration may cause them to abandon the idea altogether and adopt a programme of ignoring the whole business, in order to safeguard their sensitivity. Paradoxically, then, sometimes it is the stoical utilitarians who are really the most sensitive at heart. (I really am sensitive, really, I am.)

So, to plagiarize a quote from Douglas Adams, I love milestones. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by. If our perception of time wasn't so strongly quantitative and mathematical, perhaps we wouldn't be tempted to attach so much importance to all of these anniversaries and equinoxes. But it is, and we are. I suppose one might as well make the best of it.

Thanks for 10,000 visits everyone. Whatever that means.

Image courtesy of fld.org.uk