Life's Too Short

"Life's too short to..." It's a statement many of us use, myself included. But I'm thinking I'll start using these lines instead: Life's too delicate. Too beautiful. Too winded. Too intricate. Too rich to waste. Time is relative. As a mother of young kids I hear the old "enjoy it now because they grow up in the blink of an eye" phrase quite often. And maybe someday I'll say that too. But for now I am in it. And since I stay at home with them there are some pretty long days. I read this about aging and memory in the book Super Brain: "Every time you complain 'My memory is going,' you reinforce that message in your brain.... Once you stop paying attention and give up on learning new things, you give memory no encouragement. A simple axiom holds: whatever you pay attention to grows." I think of this axiom whenever I hear the statement about kids growing up fast, and it's true for "life's too short" as well. If you believe that, it will be so. You're essentially speeding up time by thinking that it flies by. Last evening the kids and I were playing outside and I made them bracelets from dandelion stems. Then they ran through the grass picking dandelions (one of their favorite "flowers"), and Fisher told me he could run as far as 100 moons. It was simply beautiful.