conceptual substitutions

Ticking awayThe moments that make up a dull dayYou fritter and waste the hoursIn an offhand wayAnd then one day you findTen years have got behind youNo one told you when to runYou missed the starting gunIt's been on my mind lately, how quickly the last ten years have disappeared.One moment, I was forty-two. My mom, at least, was alive. The future still felt spacious. There was time to change things. Time to become something else.Then I blinked.Now I find myself a dejected, parentless, middle-aged man, still occupying the same abrasive corner of the world. The same toxic workplace. The same exhausting cycle of guilt, fear and obligation. Fifty-two years have accumulated around me; somehow, I struggle to point to anything that explains where they went.Hope itself has started to feel like another administrative task.In 1Q84, Haruki Murakami writes:Wherever there's hope, there's a trial. Hope, however, is limited, and generally abstract, while there are countless trials, and they tend to…