Time: Friend or Foe?

Time is a concept, a value we assign to something. It flows through space like a gentle stream and all we can do is live it.
As my birthday edges nearer and nearer, I can't help, but think morbid and depressing thoughts of aging and death. Thirty. That's relatively young. Age is just a number; what matters is how you feel inside. These are thoughts that have raced through my head with hope to provide some sort of comfort in this inner turmoil.
But the fact is, in the search of meaning of life, I focus on the events, moments, that have passed. A chat with a friend. School. A song from my past. Me as a child. These recollections rush back buckets worth of memories too precious to spill and forget. I think about going back in time and doing things differently. Would that change the way I feel? The answer is no. I don't have many regrets. I just want to go back a few years and live it again-feel a much younger sense of self.
That's the truth about the past. You remember only the happy moments. I recall some negatives aspects of my past just for balance . Still the picture is rosy. Problems with parents, worrying about school, knowing what to do with life were just some parts of my younger life too. Why do I want to go back to that?
I am pretty happy. Things haven't gone the way I pictured (they never do, do they?), but I feel satisfied. In fact, I get  anxious over the possibility that I will do something differently and miss out on important experiences. Maybe that's it. The more we focus and ponder on time moving on a conveyor belt, the more we fear it. My mother tells me "to enjoy the moments rather than focus on time". Maybe that's how time should be measured. By moments. The beauty in them. The laughter, the sadness, the simple joy in surprises culminating into what we call life. Life does not wait for us. It continues like gentle stream and all we can do it live it. Time is just math assigned to it. And although age may just be a number, it holds meaning. We don't fear aging, we fear loosing what we love. People just hold time responsible.
         The truth is no matter how hard we try, we cannot stop time. It is ever present and in motion. Sometimes in broad daylight and sometimes in the dark alleys of night. When one focuses on time as a runaway bride, fast, capricious, and unwilling to stop to think its effect on others, we can't help but feel the every looming clock ticking towards our end. But when we focus on the moments. The tiny moments that are scattered like sands in the wind and land on the beach of our lives, then we can accept time. Appreciate it. We can not choose to stop time, but we can choose how to spend it.