#4 But before all of that, wiggle your big toe

I recall bringing my Course-list to my dad when I was 15 in JSS 3 and having him nod after barely looking at it, hand it back to me and say,
"Ok Yaw. Tick what courses you want to do in secondary school and then I will sign"

I was flabbergasted; which is incidentally the only word I can use to accurately describe what emotion I felt at the time. Was I really being asked to make a real decision that would affect my life?

It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I had been standing there, minding my own business and someone had come up behind and shoves me really hard. That jolt that snaps your head back from the inertia as you're thrown forward, and out of that all-so comfortable position of entropy.

Now I joke about this often, and it's true, I feel I was 22 until one fine day, I woke up and discovered, to my horror that I was in fact, almost 30.

It may have been the day I decided, after months of not exercising, to go for a 20 minute jog, and found out at literally the 20m mark, to my chagrin, that I could feel my heartbeat through my face, and I had the sneaking suspicion that if I were to run another meter, wheezing for air as I did, my heart would give one pained cry of indignation, keel over and die. Whatever happened to the rest of me after that was none of its business. 

It may have been the weeks following my 28th birthday, when I met my 2yr old nephew for the 1st time and realized with disturbing clarity, there was this entire generation of human people younger than myself; living breathing and making word-like sounds.

I like to ask people this trite question on their birthdays, "How do you feel?", for which most invariably, the answer is something like "The same as I did yesterday?"  

Well, I felt 'the same as I did yesterday' for 8 years, until I didn't.

It's like we're growing not in days, months or even years, but in leaps and bounds, interspersed between long periods where absolutely nothing happens. I coined a word for that; Homodysis. the human-equivalent of Ecydsis, the molting and growth spurts and final slow-down cycles cockroaches experience. And why I still remember that nugget from secondary school Biology, I will never know.

You are 22 because your thoughts and memories of events and people remained focused on the topic of College friends, fond memories and misadventures in secondary school (Which always feels like it was 'just yesterday'). Then, at some point, you snap to the present and the years have gone by. Everything between then and now, a blur.
What is interesting about finally getting your head sufficiently out of your own ass to realize where you are and what time it is, is dealing with the inertia of being asked to do 'grown up stuff'... whatever that means. 

It's all well and good scoring highly on a paper or holding a class enthralled by your unique insight into Plato's philosophy of Human society, or your opinion why the best form of government in African countries isn't Democracy, but when you are being paid to deliver on REAL things, no serious company cares about your highfalutin theory. They want to see results and they expect you to roll up your sleeves and manage the process to completion. And you might experience that jolt, as you're once again shoved out of yet another aspect of  comfortably passiveness. And again, and again, each time you face a new 'life challenge'.

Now that I am trying to go into business for myself, reminded every now and again by the fact that I am riding this bicycle without those training wheels I so wish were there, but I am acutely aware I couldn't possibly still have on, a small part of my consciousness is spectating from a few feet behind me, musing, 'Wow! Yaw are we seriously doing this?'

I'm guessing that part of me is some remnant of my 22 yr old self, the guy still living somewhere between 2002 and 2009. The one before the wind got knocked out by life giving him a sudden push when he least expected it. His continued existence is the thing that makes me all too aware every day I wake up and face this life, that there is no such thing as standing still, dear boy. You are either moving or your limbs are atrophying, and dying.