Bump and grind

Most people think it was the epigrammatist (google it, I had to) Friedrich von Logau who wrote one of my favorite passages ever:
Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.
I'm pretty sure that he was going for a "you reap what you sow" kind of vibe, but he also clearly knew that a good metaphor can have lots of meanings, maybe even some the guy who wrote it never saw coming.
The way I've always taken the von Logau passage is not just an observation that you should be nice to folks. I've always read it as a reminder that the conveyor belt is always on and it rolls faster than anyone can run.
It's not, however, a clever reminder that everyone dies. That diddy was played out even in von Logau's day in the 1600s. What a lot of great thinkers miss in their hurry to foretell on the inevitable death of the people that pushed them around in high school is that the ticking clock is as much a friend as an enemy.
Think of the nights you literally could not imagine how you were going to get up and function as a human the next morning. From getting too high to getting fired from a Fortune 500 company, everyone's crashed full speed into a wall they knew for sure was the end of the line, the thing that would stop them for good or at send them spiraling toward an anonymous end.
And yet, the mill ground on. You rolled out of bed at 3 p.m., ate some peanut butter straight from the jar and pulled yourself together enough to go buy some paper towels. You broke down sobbing and punched a hole in the sheet rock the moment you got back through the door, but still, you'd obtained an artifact from the world outside your grief and fear and that was enough to sustain you a few more hours.
Later, you came out of the haze long enough to halfheartedly hit the gym or meet up with friends. You briefly surfaced, thinking, Damn, I really used to like this kind of thing. Then your ex texted you or the bill from the funeral parlor came in the mail and the tide surged back, washing you back out to sea even as you fought. The uncaring mill went about its work.
Then some day you awoke to realize that you had a new job, new girlfriend or new house you had been taking for granted. Strangely, you didn't heave a sigh of relief and thank your god of choice for the opportunity to not be a wreck. You just shrugged and said, So. This is what it's like. This seems familiar somehow.
And that's how the mill works. It will grind sadness as soon as happiness. Skill and wisdom accrue like silty ore and pain and confusion wash gradually downstream. Age and guile are extracted from youth and inexperience at a rate so slow no one even notices until they exclaim, God, my back hurts. And where did all this gold come from?
•••
So long sweet summer/ I stumbled upon you and gratefully basked in your rays/ So long sweet summer/ I fell into you/ Now you're gracefully falling away