We think we have until later. We think about things as existing in the deep future: When our kids grow up. When we retire. When we get old. When we die.

But this is wrong, the Stoics said, especially when it comes to the idea of our mortality. Seneca wrote that death wasn’t something we move slowly towards, but instead something that is rushing at us. We are dying every minute, he said, we are dying every day.

So it goes with our children, literally and figuratively, as uncomfortable as that can be to consider. We are losing our 2-year-old and 12-year-old and 20-year-old the second they become those things. They will not one day grow up, they are growing up. There is no later…there is only the evaporating present.

We can’t defer. We can’t delay. We can’t tell ourselves that we have time. We have to take the time now. We have to be present for what this is—the moments big and small. Because we have them right now…and soon enough they (and we) will be gone.