Youve Got Time

We were at the park with our one year old when a man with a scraggly beard and sunglasses approached us.

“Enjoy these days, when they’re toddling around and cooing at you. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and they’re never coming back.”

I don’t remember asking him for advice. But this is typical, this need people have to randomly tell me I need to enjoy this moment.

Just because they see me with a kid, and they remember their own kids at that age, and they wish they’d been more present, and so they’re, I guess, making up for it by giving me an unsolicited lecture.

Well.

All of life is precious and every moment is worth fully experiencing. Give me an example of a moment that doesn’t need to be fully experienced. The dentist? The grocery line? What makes these moments less valuable than watching our kids on slides and swings? The value we ascribe to the present moment is devised, labeled, and structured only by our own brains.

The present moment can’t be less or more interesting by comparison, because there’s nothing to compare it to other than memories of the past, or hopes and fears about the future. It’s like comparing the moon to photos of the moon.

There was a lady once outside the DC metro shouting “everybody! You’ve got time! You’ve got time because you are ALIVE!”

This is a much more useful interruption. Yes, we are alive, and time is on our side if we flow with it instead of against it.