The favorite conversation of people just out of high school seems to be something like, “it hasn’t hit me yet…that we’re out of school…forever, like, I mean, forever…” I’ve been hearing it for some time, tossed here and there, in and out of random conversation. Of course, I never really joined in, considering I kept telling myself it had already hit me–out of high school, big whoop.

Well, I thought wrong, like I always do. It’s that youthful arrogance, gets the best of me sometimes. And where I thought the reality had passed over me subtly, it instead did so abruptly.

See, I was walking back from a three mile run, coming down my street. Nothing particularly interesting was going on in my head–just the normal thoughts and thingamabobs that pass through the head of your average teenager. Then I saw the boy on the bike.

He was no special boy, had on a red helmet and a yellow shirt. His bike was a small black Huffy, if I remember correctly, and it had no training wheels. The importance of the lack of training wheels–his father was standing beside him as he pedaled his bike across their driveway, his hands careful around the boy’s back, being sure for balance.

A car had pulled up to their driveway a few moments earlier; in fact, that was what caught my attention. Out came an old man in a square black hat, carrying a bag of some sort, and an old woman with her purse in a nice dress. These, I assumed, were the grandparents of the boy; and I was proven right when the father pointed to them and told the boy to show grandpa his bike.

It was nothing significant, you see. A boy learning how to ride a bike with the help of his father, and his grandparents standing beside the both of them, watching in the joy that can only come from having walked both of those lives. No, the events weren’t important, but the situation, the coincidence, was everything.

I almost stopped walking, this strange feeling rising in my gut, of–of something; hell if I knew what was going on in there. The father was pushing the boy along on his bike as the grandparents laughed and pulled more bags out of their car–what on Earth was causing this sensation in me?

Then, I realized.

It was life.

I was witnessing these separate generations of collective lives, with me having only now begun to set out on my own life. Touching would be barely skimming the instance; rather, it was delightful–it filled me with a happiness and a shock, at understanding what could, what might, lie in store in the future.

Could I end up being a parent?

Could I end up being a grandparent?

Life is chock full of surprises, as they say; and, right then, I got it. It hit me. High school is over, not too many tears are shed over that, but I am moving onto somewhere new: a locale of brilliant spontaneity. Who knows what’s gonna happen? I wish I did, but at the same time, I don’t.

And to think–

All of that came from a four-year old boy riding his new bicycle.

Think daily,

A Southpaw