His View: The view changes as the years go passing by

Here we are, neck-deep in the holiday season, and it feels pretty good. My oldest child is home from college, there’s a lot of baking going on, and the house is brimming with festive spirit. I’m the pater familias in a Norman Rockwell scene, one that’s likely to recur over and over in the years ahead.

But the inexorable march of time sets a guy to thinking about those years ahead. In my case, there’s a birthday looming later this winter — one that will place me, unequivocally, in my mid-60s.

Medicare. Social Security. Senior citizenship. They are sobering reminders that the wheel of life spins in only one direction. Other reminders include prescription eyeglasses, hearing aids, and the fact that I can’t remember a damn thing.

There are many phases in a well-lived life, and I used to revel in them as one supplanted another. There was the excitement of going off to college. Then the satisfaction of landing a job and supporting myself. And the unbridled freedom of years spent traveling from Borneo to Zanzibar. Each new phase was a welcome oasis on the journey of life.

As I look across the dinner table at my high school- and college-age children, I’m a little apprehensive about what comes next. For them, the days are limitless — like grains of sand on a beach. For me, well, I feel like a booster rocket from the Apollo Project. My wife and I have put our kids on a good trajectory, and (relatively) soon they’ll begin navigating under their own power. As they climb for the heights, full of energy and vigor, the booster rocket flames out and falls away.

That, too, is part of the cycle of life.

People come to terms with aging in different ways, and it seems everyone has advice to share. I particularly value this passage from “Desiderata,” written by Max Ehrmann nearly 100 years ago: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.”

I’m still relatively healthy and fit, so I want to savor the remaining fumes of my youth. There will be a few more ski trips to backcountry huts, a few more kayak trips down wild rivers, and a few more peaks in the Tetons. And I’ve still got the energy for backpacking with my wife and kids.

But my mind is beginning to make promises my body can’t keep. It’s one indignity after another as my back hurts, my knees creak, and my head fills with shooting stars when I get out of bed too quickly.

Changes are afoot.

To twist the words of former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, “As nightfall does not come at once, neither does old age. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.”

So I’m looking ahead, trying not to disappear into the darkness.

My wife is a good deal younger than I am, and my dog has more energy than any human can possibly dissipate, so I won’t lack for companionship in the years ahead. But it’s going to get quiet when our youngest child saddles up and rides away to college.

“The years teach much which the days never know,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and I’m reminded of that whenever I comb through old photos of my wife and kids. Back when the photos were taken, it felt like those days would never end — that I’d always be a young father with a young family — but those days passed, uncounted, like leaves in the wind.

Time seemed infinite back then, and life was full of possibilities. My list of possibilities has narrowed considerably and now I find myself looking in the mirror and thinking, “I was the future once.”

Brock has been a Daily News columnist for nearly one-third of his life.