Don't Worry... It's All Good

Is there anything that puts time in perspective more than watching it pass as children grow? As an adult firmly in middle age, a few years is just that... a few years. 

Until you watch those years pass as a child grows. The difference between a child at age eight and at 11 is remarkable. 

I listened to Kati Marston on "Morning Joe" yesterday and I'm compelled to pick up her new memoir, "Paris: A Love Story." Marston recounts her first marriage to Peter Jennings, the news anchor, which ended in divorce, and her second marriage to Richard Holbrooke, a diplomat working to end the Afghan war. Holbrooke died in 2010. Not only does the personal story of their lives sound interesting, but I am drawn to Kati's perspective, the way in which Kati is emphatic that we live life fully every single day. In an interview with NPR, she shares that the novel is about grabbing onto life after loss... "Because I have a keener sense now more than ever of how elusive life is, and how you can't count on anything, and how important it is to live in the present. And I hope my readers will draw comfort from the fact that there are lives beyond the one that one loses."

When I hear that kind of admonition, I am terrified. What if I run out of time to experience all of it? I can easily become melancholy and the memories of the past and dreams once entertained fall gently around me like snowflakes... 

And then I see the progression of time in these photos and in these faces, and I am reminded that I never envisioned this kind of charmed life that I have. It's all good.