TRULY LIVED MOMENTS

(Those rare and special times that one both loses and finds themselves all at once) -Laura Kieger

"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights, it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."

-Mary Ritter Beard

Bill and I in Vancouver, BC 2016

Alex and walleye, Lake Vermillion, Minnesota

Addy biking in Paris.

From Summer's Complaint...

As parents of three young kids, my old Human Development textbook sometimes still came in handy for Bill and me. In it was a quote about middle age that had been branded into my consciousness. Though I don’t remember it exactly, it went something like, “When you are young, you look at your life in terms of how much time you have in front of you. But by middle age, that same mental orientation makes a dramatic shift and you then see your life as the time you have left.”

In the end, your time is your life. Whenever you speak or think the word “time,” replace it with the word “life.”

It struck me at that moment, just how much of my time, my life, was dedicated to, well, busyness—the twin devils of distraction and preoccupation that “serves the same psychological role that it always has: to keep us sufficiently distracted that we don’t have to ask ourselves potentially terrifying questions about how we are spending our days.”

I needed to let certain tasks go undone, to say “no” more often. To be willing to sacrifice “stuff” for experiences. To invest in creating memories, not clutter. Travel. Volunteer. Be present. Essentially, I needed to do the things I loved most with the people I loved most. It was time to start planning.