Feeling my age...

So today I'm blogging on location from my post at the scoring table of the 2008 Allegheny Open Bible quizzing tournament, of which I am the tournament director. The church we have the tournament in put in wireless internet 3 years ago, which makes the idle time I spend waiting for people to bring me scores a bit more interesting. I also have this week's Sports Illustrated and Chris Coste's book with me for additional entertainment. If it sounds like I might be complaining about being bored, trust me, I'm not. As director of a one day tournament involving over 20 teams (okay, so it's 21, but over 20 sounds more impressive), boring is a VERY good thing. In the morning portion of the tournament, I'm either going to be bored for significant periods of time, or I'm going to be ridiculously stressed because things are going wrong. I spend a lot of time prior to today doing things to me sure I will have a lot of downtime.

Anyhow, I'm feeling kind of old today. The reason for this is rather simple - the material that the kids are quizzing on today (Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon) is the last material I quizzed on back in my quizzing days. The material comes around on an 8 year cycle, so that means this year is my 8th year as a tournament director, and those 8 years immediately followed 8 years as a quizzer. All of that means that about 80% of the quizzers running around today were not born when I started quizzing back in 1992-93. Couple that with the fact that I went out with the family last night to celebrate my 28th birthday last night (my actual birthday isn't until Wednesday, but the folks are heading to Mexico for a few days starting tomorrow night), and I'm definitely "feeling my age".

That's not to say that I'm feeling depressed or bothered by my advancing years, even as 30 comes bearing down on me with more inevitablity than ever. It's just that there are certain things that serve as concrete markers of just how much time has past, and I hit two of them within a couple days of each other. I've never been one to subscribe to the idea that the younger years (particularly the high school and college years) are the best ones of your life. Let's really think about it, because if you take that view of life, it means I would be sitting here at almost 28 with nothing to do but look back. And that's just crazy. I don't think you have to be a crazy optimist (especially since I'm not one in general) to believe that each stage of life has it's own adventures, joys, and benefits, and that we should always have something to look ahead to. As we look back on our lives, we often tend to nostalgize the good things about the past, and forget the various pains, sorrows, and disappointments that those former stages presented. For me, the past is nothing something to look back upon and wish for a return to, but it's roadmap into my future - to learn from and use to make the years to come more special and wonderful. It's a perspective that I sometimes lose sight of, but am lately finding it easier to keep returning to.