The Years Are Indeed Too Short
"The days are long, and the years are short."
This phrase was said to me multiple times when my kids were infants. I definitely understood the "days are long" part. With newborn twins, just the 16 bottles per day part felt long. On the other hand, I didn't fully understand the "years are short" part. Everything just felt long....and exhausting.
The boys turned seven yesterday, and we had a great day celebrating. Soccer game, roller skating, ice cream cake....lots of fun stuff. Wow, the years are indeed short. The twos and threes stage felt brutally slow, but they went from four to seven in what seemed like a month. I once read that 75% of all the time we spend with our kids will happen by the time they turn 12. Yikes! That's a staggering statistic. And a depressing one, at that.
Money can buy a lot of things, but it can't buy back lost time. It can buy houses, cars, and technology, but it can't give us back the time, memories, and moments we lost. Over the last few years, as I began to realize the years go by far too fast, I thought I had a solution. I thought if I just tried really hard to live in the moment, it would make time slow down. Turns out it doesn't work like that. Therefore, I eventually conceded that time will fly by no matter what we do, so we might as well embrace it for its rapidly moving beauty.
Happy birthday to Finn and Pax, and I'm excited to experience whatever time I'm blessed to have left with them. It's days like yesterday when meaning over money becomes even more glaring and obvious. Leaving my prior career and starting over 4.5 years ago was one of the scariest decisions of my life. I felt reasonably confident in my decision when I first made it, but that decision has been affirmed over, and over, and over again through the years. Not because it's been easy (it's actually the hardest thing I've ever done), but rather because it matters.
If you're ever teetering on the fence of meaning vs. money, look your children in the eyes. It only takes about 0.2 seconds to realize which side of the fence we should land. Meaning. Always meaning.