We live.
We die.
And somewhere between those two things, we try to make sense of what it means to have been here.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
Not dying, necessarily.
Living.
And how much of it slips through our fingers while we’re busy trying to figure everything out.
It’s strange, isn’t it?
We know none of this lasts forever.
We know the people we love won’t always be here. That the children we raise will grow up. That the homes we build won’t always be ours. That the faces looking back at us in old photographs will someday belong to versions of ourselves we barely recognize.
We know all of that.
And still, we live like there’s always more time.
More time to say what we feel.
More time to be happy.
More time to actually enjoy the life we’re so busy trying to hold together.
And lately, I’ve been asking myself a question I don’t particularly like the answer to.
When did I become someone who has to remind herself to enjoy her own life?
Not because I don’t know how to enjoy things.
I do.
I can lose myself in a sunset. Spend an afternoon behind my camera, completely absorbed in something beautiful. Laugh until my stomach hurts or get caught up in a conversation I wish could last a little longer.
And when I’m there, I’m really there.
But somewhere between those moments, I slip back into the routine.
Wake up.
Go to work.
Take care of what needs to be done.
Come home.
Go to bed.
Do it again.
Days become weeks. Weeks become months. And sometimes I look around and wonder where all that time went.
Because I was there for it.
I did everything I was supposed to do.
But was I really living it?
Or was I just getting through it?
I think about the younger versions of myself sometimes.
Not because everything was better then. God knows it wasn’t.
But I miss the parts of me that didn’t carry so much in their head.
The one who could simply enjoy something without everything else waiting in the background.
Maybe that’s what I really miss.
The feeling of having room for life.
I’ve spent so much of my life doing what needed to be done.
There were years when getting through the day was enough. When I didn’t have the luxury of wondering whether I was happy.
I had responsibilities. People who needed me. Things that had to be handled whether I was falling apart or not.
So I got up.
I went to work.
I took care of everyone.
I cried when no one could see me.
And I kept going.
Sometimes people mistake that for strength.
Maybe some of it was.
But some of it was simply having no other choice.
I don’t want to pretend every painful thing that happened to me made me better.
Some things just hurt.
Some things took years from me.
Some things changed parts of me I wish hadn’t needed changing.
But here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
There is so much more to my life than what I’ve survived.
There have been beautiful moments, too.
Thousands of them.
Some I remember so clearly I can almost step back into them.
Others I probably walked right past because my mind was somewhere else.
And that hurts in a different way.
Not just the things I’ve lost.
But the things I didn’t realize I had.
The ordinary things.
The little things.
The ones that didn’t announce themselves as important.
Nobody tells you when you’re holding your child for the last time before they become too big to carry.
You just put them down.
And you never pick them up that way again.
You don’t know when the last ordinary conversation with someone will be.
You don’t know which photograph will become the one you keep going back to.
You don’t know when the dog curled up beside you will someday become the reason the room feels too quiet.
Or when a familiar voice will become something you would give anything to hear again.
And that’s almost unbearable to think about.
Because if I’d known certain moments were the last ones, I would have stayed longer.
I would have listened more closely.
I would have memorized things I didn’t know I needed to remember.
The way someone laughed.
The sound of their footsteps.
The feeling of being held by someone I thought would always be there.
I would have paid attention.
God, I would have paid attention.
But maybe that’s the heartbreak of being human.
We don’t know what we’re going to miss until we’re missing it.
And sometimes the things we miss don’t even make sense.
I’ve missed people I know weren’t good for me.
I’ve missed places where I wasn’t happy.
I’ve missed versions of my life that nearly broke me.
Not because I want any of it back.
But because there were pieces of those days that mattered.
There was laughter in the middle of the pain.
There were moments when I believed everything was going to work out.
And sometimes I miss that woman.
The one who believed.
The one who didn’t know yet.
I think that’s one of the hardest parts of getting older.
Realizing you can be grateful for the life you have and still grieve the one you thought you’d have.
That you can make the right decision and still ache over what it cost you.
That you can be happy in a moment and still carry sadness you haven’t quite figured out what to do with.
And maybe those feelings don’t need to be reconciled.
Maybe they’re just part of being here.
There are moments I’d give almost anything to step back into.
Not to change them.
Not to fix anything.
Just to be there again.
Five minutes.
That’s all.
Five minutes in a room that no longer exists the way I remember it.
Five minutes with someone whose voice I can no longer hear whenever I want.
Five minutes with my children little again.
Five minutes in a moment before everything changed.
And the strange thing is, I probably wouldn’t do anything extraordinary.
I’d just sit there.
I’d look around.
I’d take it all in.
I’d let the moment be enough.
Because I know something now that I didn’t know then.
The ordinary days were never ordinary.
They were my life.
And they’re still my life.
Right now.
Today.
This day that probably doesn’t feel particularly important.
The one filled with responsibilities and work and things that need to get done.
The one I might be tempted to rush through because I’m tired or distracted or thinking about tomorrow.
Someday, I might wish I could come back to this day.
I might wish I could see the people who are here now.
Hear their voices.
Feel what it was like to be this age, in this body, with these possibilities still in front of me.
Even with everything I’m carrying.
Even with everything I haven’t figured out.
And that thought gets to me.
Because what if these are the days?
What if this imperfect, unfinished, sometimes exhausting life is the one I’ll someday wish I had appreciated more?
What if I’m already standing in the middle of things I’m going to miss?
I think that’s why I’ve started reaching for my camera more.
Why I want to stop when the sky turns a certain color.
Why a flower, a beautiful landscape, or the way the light falls across something ordinary can hold my attention longer than it used to.
Because for those few moments, I’m not thinking about what I haven’t accomplished or worrying about what comes next.
I’m just there.
Looking at something beautiful.
And letting it be beautiful.
Nothing to fix.
Just a moment I get to have.
And I wonder why I make so little room for that feeling in the rest of my life.
Why I can give so much of myself to things that drain me, but struggle to make time for the things that make me feel alive.
I don’t want to wake up ten years from now and realize I spent another decade waiting for a life that was already happening.
I don’t want to spend so much time thinking about my life that I forget to be part of it.
And I don’t want to reach the end of it believing that all I ever did was endure.
Because there has been more.
So much more.
And there is still so much I haven’t experienced yet.
I think about the end sometimes.
Not in a way that frightens me.
More in a way that makes me wonder.
When all of this is over, what will I wish I’d done differently?
Will I wish I’d worked more?
Worried more?
Spent more years being critical of myself?
I don’t think so.
I think I’ll wish for people.
For voices.
For moments.
For one more dinner around a table.
One more conversation.
One more chance to say what I meant.
And that brings me back to the in between.
This strange, beautiful, heartbreaking stretch of time where everything happens.
Where we love.
Where we lose.
Where we make mistakes and carry regrets.
Where we become people we never expected to be.
Where some things end before we’re ready.
And where, somehow, the sun still comes up the next morning.
Another sunrise.
Another conversation.
Another chance to laugh until we can’t breathe.
Another chance to make a memory we don’t even know we’re making.
I don’t need every day to be extraordinary.
I don’t need everything to work out the way I hoped.
I don’t even need to have all the answers.
I want to stop for the sunset.
Take the picture.
Stay a little longer.
Laugh a little louder.
Notice the things that are easy to overlook when life gets loud.
And on the days when everything feels heavy, I want to remember that those days count, too.
That I don’t have to feel happy every moment to recognize that my life is still happening.
We live.
We die.
And everything that makes us human happens somewhere in between.
I don’t know how much of my story is left.
I don’t know who will still be beside me when I reach the final pages.
I don’t know what else I’ll lose, or what beautiful things I haven’t even imagined yet.
But I know this much.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life preparing to live it.
I want the ordinary days.
The messy ones.
The beautiful ones.
Even the ones that hurt.
Because someday, all of this will be a memory.
And I want to know that while it was mine,
I was here for it.
All of it.
