As you enter the hallway off the elevator his room is about 50 feet away.

He sits in a wheelchair, and when you approach the open door to his room, he does not see you.

The room itself is generic, bland, bare; people do not really live there – they just pass through.

He sits in there in a wheelchair with his head cocked slightly up, gazing at the television with his jaw hanging open.

His expression looks blank. He fits right in.

His body is slumped from the weight of 87 years.

He is alone now, because his wife of 60 years died two years ago, and he can no longer live on his own and take care of himself.

Now, other people have to attend to bathing him, for instance, and he hates that.

If left to himself, he would not take another bath. Why bother?

Time is a sequence of events. You put one foot in front of the other in time. You converse with yourself in time. You move from this part of the room to that, from this part of the world to that in time.

You make love in time. You die a little bit at a time, and you also grow up and expand your life in sequences of accomplishments in which you take on more and more responsibility, living out the consequences of your choices and actions over time.

As you sit in the pavilion where they play basketball games at the University of Washington, up on the screen they flash pictures of student life and announce congratulations to the graduating class of 2008.

He sits among almost 700 faculty and students in various renditions of black gowns with square hats and tassles.

He turns to the left and the right chatting, and you see the back of his head. You remember the little boy who went over the handle bars of his bicycle and turned his chin into hamburger.

He grew up and even has a great job with a major firm already.

He told you, while sitting in his small apartment in downtown Seattle, while the crazy man stands outside on the street, lifts his sign, and rails against the police force, that he plans to purchase a house before he gets another car, because he can get around just fine on his bicycle. ("Oh, not the bicycle again," you think to yourself.)

If you look in the abstracts for research on aging in the databases of the American Psychological Association, what you get mostly is a bunch of articles about the physiology of receptors in the brain, Alzheimer's, genetics, and the metabolism of tryptophan. There was even an article about the outer and middle ear contributions to presbycusis in the brown Norway rat. None of these communicate the human side of aging.

There is a sequence of events we all navigate in the course of a lifetime. Some of these things we might call accomplishments and others we would agree were more like failures.

Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

Sometimes you can't figure out which it's going to be, because all you know is that you're still in process.

The best you can do under those circumstances is to just keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

What is often interesting is to step back from the normal pace of life – the speed at which it seems time is moving, which is a relative thing – and to notice people stepping through their own various sequences.

Most of the time it's not as important what you step – what you do – as it is how you go about stepping. If, for instance, you're so trained on the inner and outer ear contributions to the brown Norway rats in life, you may miss the way people feel in your presence, the way they go blank as you race through your descriptions or the way they back off from you, miss you, change the subject on you, or the way they flinch when you move, or the way they seem to get tense and have to defend themselves, or the ways in which they relax and open like a flower in the fresh morning sun, the ways they move up next to you and cuddle under your arms, or the gentle smiles that form on their faces when you come into view.

Sequences. Therapists evaluate the quality of their work by examining the tight sequences in therapeutic processes, as events take place over the course of any given session.

They follow affective markers, the ways in which emotional events follow one another, the ways in which therapists and clients affect one another, for therapy is also a passage full of meaning. It is time well spent, and often marks a turning point the sequence of a life.

At any given time we are all pictures that represent graduating from one time of life and moving on to another. Every person is caught up in a sequence of events – even those who seem to be no longer really living but just watching the walls peel, waiting for time to cease.