The more there is, the more there is, the less there is.

I saw an old man crossing the street Sunday afternoon, a cane in each hand helping to propel him across Broadway. His small frame was bent over almost double at the waist and his back was nearly parallel to the ground. He had on a tan trench coat that covered his small eighty-some-year-old shoulders, and as he shuffled along he clung to a plastic bag from Zabar’s in his left hand. He was moving impossibly slow. Left foot. Stop. Right foot. Stop. People turned their heads as they approached him but kept moving after taking a few concerned looks and going on their way. I looked up and could see that the traffic light on this four lane two-way thoroughfare was about to change from red to green, and that he was about to get caught in the middle of fast paced moving traffic.

As I came upon him I bent down and asked if I could help carry his bag and get him across the street. At such an intimate distance I saw that he was in belted dress pants, he had on a crisp white dress shirt and a striped tie knotted in a full Windsor topped with a plaid cap that covered the stark white hair on his head. I wondered who he was and where he was coming from or going to and I thought, looking at him, that surely he was thinking: wasn’t it just yesterday that I was a young man able to get across the street without having to give it a single thought?

In a muffled tone he told me that he didn’t need any help getting to the bus stop. He didn’t even bother to look up at me as though I’d asked him an entirely absurd question that he was barely willing to justify with a response. I looked up and could see that the distance to the bus stop couldn’t have been more than about ten strides, but at the rate he was going he wouldn’t be getting there for at least another ten minutes. So I waited. I stepped back and stayed near to his side as the traffic light turned from red to green and cars and cabs began to move (annoyed horns honking loudly), around us.

As I stood by him his eyes remained firmly planted on the ground with extreme focus as he moved (left. stop. right. stop.) I wondered if all those years ago he could have in any way predicted this slow moving moment in the middle of Broadway with a complete and total stranger by his side. Because he was young once. He lived through wars and bad economies and bad presidents and raised a family and drank beers and went to baseball games and buried loved ones and watched his life go by only to find himself now here, in the middle of a busy street on a warm and overcast Sunday afternoon in Manhattan alone.

I guess we can’t, can we, allow ourselves to see that far into the future when all that’s there is what is left for us to look back on. How can we when our legs still move easily and we work out our muscles regularly and we eat too much and drink too much and are reckless with our hearts —who can be bothered now with the consequences that time will inevitably bring? Push it off while we can, those sad and distant moments of our future when we wonder where everything suddenly disappeared to, when we wonder where the time went and the days when we were able to get across the street on our own.

After we made it safely, I left him at the bus stop where the driver of the cross-town took over the job of getting this man to where he needed to go (perhaps that was all his day had been, small moments with nameless faces all of whom helped him bit by bit on his journey through this city that must look so different to him than it does to me).

Sometimes I think about what my life will be like ten, twenty, fifty years from now and how much the choices and decisions I’m making now, (in each passing hour, minute, moment…) will affect what it will look like if I'm fortunate enough to get there. A man who had been watching me assist the elderly gentleman across the street stopped me on the corner and shaking his head said, “So sad, that man. Just so sad.” Well, I thought, what do you know? What do any of us know about the lives being lived by the people around us? Sad that he's old? Sad that he’s by himself? Perhaps. But any New Yorker will tell you that being on your own doesn't necessarily mean sad, and from the looks of him this was a man who knew a thing or two about how to live.

So there’s no point in wondering where we’ll end up because there’s no real way to know all that our lives will be like as we move forward, regardless of the pace (because even when we think we have it all figured out, we don’t). So today as time flashes by more quickly than I can make sense of (April already?), all I can hope is that if one day in my distant future I happen to find myself alone in the middle of a busy Manhattan street with the traffic light of my life about to change from red to green —that I won’t look back on the road I took that got me there and find it paved with regrets.

And it wouldn’t hurt if I also happened to find myself impeccably well-dressed, too.