2. The Predator
While you hopefully do learn to appreciate the small moments, at a certain ageand I believe it's different for everyoneyou realize time is no longer on your side. When you're young there's an overabundance of it for wasting (and despite what anyone might say, people nowadays find more frivolous ways than ever to waste it). It's easy to say I have time yet to go to college; or time yet to get married; or time yet to have kids...and then the Runaway Train happens and suddenly you don't find yourself with nearly as much time as you thought. It's also often the precursor of the so-called midlife crisis; damn it, if I can't write the world's greatest novel, at least I'm going to bang me a twenty-two year old with a nice rack. That type of thing. When I turned thirty, it suddenly hit me that I was going to die one day. I don't even remember what precipitated it because I've always been in good health and most of my family members are still with me; it just hit me like the hammer of Thor. To the point that every little ache or pain I had was suddenly a fatal malady; if I had a headache, it was an aneurysm. If I had a cough, it was lung cancer. If I had a pain in my right side, I was in hypochondriac heaven because there were multiple organs that could have been failing on me. WebMD became my new best friend for self-diagnosing. It eventually passed...or at least, the realization came to me that one can't spend their life worrying about death or they're just wasting their life. Yet, at some point that realization that there's an invisible predator standing at the ready to pounce is there, and it never goes away.