No one ever thinks about the overall strangeness of perspective. Being young, and relatively new to the world, everything is so important, everything is shocking: stop! Look! Listen! But give it half a century or so, and suddenly it blurs. Everything that happens is withered and dry, and as life progresses, happenstance gets stale, and though you may not notice it, the sustenance life feeds you is no longer moist and bursting with flavor, but crumbling, dry, tasteless. As life is sapped out of you, the flavor is sapped out of life.

Take five years. To a man nearly fifty, five years is not much. To a man like my dad, five years is just tax returns, a shift in business, maybe a bit of an upgraded pay grade. Five years is watching his son move out and his daughter grow. Five years is just another small percentage of life, and not much more.

But to me, take five years, and you take away most of me. To me, five years takes eight inches. It takes breasts and hips and the scars on my wrists. Five years takes love and hate; it takes emotions I didn’t know existed. Five years takes innocence and hapless happiness, and it gifts experience and wary optimism. Five years is the difference between elementary school and high school. It’s the difference between ew cooties and pining after someone. Five years is momentous personal growth; it’s self-hatred and cautious acceptance.

You give me five years and it will be high school and college. You give me five years and it will be the ripest time of my life.

But you give them to my dad, and to him, they will be just five years. They’ll be me moving out, and having no more children to watch grow up.

You give me five years and they will be some of the most important moments of my life. You give me five years and they will be my career; they will launch me into the future.

But you give them to my dad, and they will be just tax returns. What was to me a critical eternity will be to him nothing more than a clement rest.

And so I give you perspective. The ripeness of youth, and the dryness of age. I give you perspective and ask you to not think of tax returns. I give you perspective, and I beg you to remember every five years. When you’ve passed over so many, and you start to understand perspective, but not with any of the care you thought you’d give, I beg you: stop. Look. Listen. Maybe things are still important. Shocking.