Sometimes it feels like it, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it feels like our lives are moving very quickly, but often in the day-to-dayness, it doesn’t. We are going from appointment to appointment, practice to practice, living from school break to school break, moving towards each milestone and grade level and accomplishment.

In Meditations (our favorite edition here), Marcus Aurelius, a father of many children, reminds himself not to get lost in this, to lose the perspective of what is happening. “Time is a river,” he writes, “a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.” And like a river, it’s heading to a final destination, often at speeds and with a force that would seem incomprehensible to a person simply observing it from the banks.

Our kids are being pulled away from us inexorably, their childhood being pulled away from them. We are, ourselves, being pulled towards old age, towards our inevitable mortality as well as being pulled towards adversity and difficulties we cannot yet even conceive of (because that’s what life has in store for all of us).

We are not in control. We are powerless to stop it. All we can do is keep track of it. All we can do is respect it, as we do a river or any body of water. Dangers lurk. Pay attention. All we can do is appreciate the majesty of it, the beauty and the grace of it. All we can do is go along for the ride.

That’s life. Let’s make sure we parent (and live) accordingly.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come.