alt Hacker NewsThis hits me like a brick wall with my young children. Seeing them change so rapidly is a glimpse into how short life is and how often an experience unknowingly becomes the last of its kind.
There is so much to be gained by slowing down, focusing on what you can be grateful for, and not striving for more.
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Our daughter turned thirteen this year. Counting the number of remaining family summer vacations, Christmases, etc, remaining really hit home for me this year.
Some of the days have been very, very long. The weeks, months, and years have been so short.
Likewise, I already have some regrets about not being as present with the first year of my second kid because of various other life distractions/stresses. Increasingly my biggest fear/worry/anxiety in life is that I just won’t be present for it - which is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
don't you just go back to your old habits once this realization has passed.
we were desiged to want more it impossible to override that design.
This passage from Trading Bases by Joe Peta chokes me up everytime.
> There's an expression on Wall Street, often attributed to Warren Buffett, which goes, "They don't ring a bell at the top." There's tremendous wisdom in that adage, because while in retrospect it's easy to pinpoint the day that the market (or even a specific stock) reached an all-time high that looks unlikely to ever be attained again in the foreseeable future, at the moment it happened it was impossible to recognize. That's because, unlike market bottoms, which usually have a crescendo feeling to them accompanied by investor panic, a market top generally passes without fanfare, indistinguishable from the series of tops that preceded it.
> You know when else they don't ring a bell? For parents, they don't ring a bell the last time you read Goodnight Moon. They don't do it the last time you watch Sleeping Beauty and they don't do it the last time you help your daughter put on the same article of clothing she's wanted to wear every day as a toddler. Instead, a couple years after the fact, you find the book on a shelf, the DVD in a box, and the tights with the pink ballerinas on them in the back of a drawer. You can't for the life of you remember the last time you read the book, danced to "Once Upon a Dream" with your daughter on your feet, or helped put those tights on. But you do know that now she reads to herself at bedtime, she dances, alone, to Taylor Swift, and the tights—well, the tights wouldn't even make it over her knees.