This Saturday in March is a special day for Noah (my son), Austin (my brother-in-law), and me. It signifies a full day of watching Idaho High School Basketball Championships. We meet early for breakfast and then head to the Idaho Center where we watch 6 different divisions play for a championship.That means over 12 hours of spending time together watching basketball, eating over-priced food, and loving being with one another in an atmosphere full of dramatic stories unfolding before our very eyes.
At the end of the night each year, the Idaho High School Activities Association honors a team from the past in a “Legends of the Game” ceremony.
Up until this year, all of the teams being honored have been well before my time.
But not tonight. Tonight, a team was honored that I remember very well. In fact, one of the players was hugely inspirational in my development as a player and I spent many hours trying to emulate not only his skills, but his very way of being on the court. He was smooth and stealthy like a cat. Never rattled. Always under control. Measured and yet passionate. His ball-handling skills were so advanced that they looked effortless and were always purposeful. He found ways to put his teammates in positions to succeed, and he was never not leading by example.
I admired him.
Earlier this morning, when I realized that his team was going to be honored, I was excited to see him walk out onto that court.
But when the time came, and his team did walk out on the court, I turned to my brother-in-law and said something like, “This can’t be their team. These guys look so old. Do I look that old? They’re only a year or so older than I am.”
He assured me that the team I was looking at was the right team and then I set to finding the player that had inspired me so much.
I couldn’t find him.
When they finally called his name, I felt my stomach sink.
Not because he wasn’t there, but because he was there and he looked so, so different.
I could never have picked him out of a crowd and any cat-like movements were distant echoes of the past.
I felt a wave of sadness come over me.
I was surprised by it. I know we are all getting older and I like how I am aging and how I am with this process. I am friends with death and have made my peace with it whenever and however it takes this body.
But there was something that caught me off-guard tonight.
That player still existed in my mind as his 17 year old self. He had never ceased existing as such.
Until tonight.
And there was the sense of time having passed us by without us really noticing it.
What a strange phrase that is.
Time passing us by.
The more I sat with this phrase and the feelings that were coming and going, the more I began to see that time is a thing like other things.
And it passes.
It passes us.
It passes us by.
Here in this common phrase of our vernacular arises a truth that I keep finding everywhere I go: I am unchanging loving awareness in which the ever-changing flow of life (including time) arises and passes by.
Time passes us by.
Time passes by us.
And, sure, these bodies age, but who is noticing?
Who is time passing by?
Who is time passing by?
Peace.
