Only when it’s over will we realize it. Only when it’s all been stripped away will we be able to see.
How not present we were. How much we took it for granted. How often we prioritized the wrong thing. How needlessly strict or harsh we were.
For Joan Didion, whose beautiful (but haunting) books A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, we have been learning from and talking about, this came when she lost her husband and her adult daughter in short order. The books she wrote were about grief sure, but not just grief at what had disappeared but also grief at the unavoidable realizations that came from that loss.
“How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here,” she writes in Blue Nights, “is something else I could never afford to see.” We can’t afford to see it because it’s too painful. We can’t afford to not see it either.
Someday this will be over. They will grow up. They will move out. You will get old. Accidents happen. Cancer happens. But right now? Right now you have them. Right now you have the moment. Will you appreciate it? Will you be here for it? Will you value the right things? Will you be the parent you want to be?
Because you can do and be all those things. If only you learn to appreciate the moment first.
