03/01/2026
🥹❤️
Time turns everything to dust. Your great deeds. Your plans. All that you build and own.
The part of parenting people do not often talk about is the heartbreak of it all. Each year, each month, even each ordinary day is a small goodbye. You say farewell to the baby and welcome the toddler. You say goodbye to the toddler and welcome the radiant, rambunctious child. And the child keeps growing, and growth is beautiful, and it is also an endless letting go.
Time takes the little baby.
All that remains is love.
Love and memory.
When I was younger this truth disturbed me so deeply, that everything turns to dust, that so many moments of our days slip through our fingers and are eventually forgotten, that even our great deeds and dazzling successes fade into nothing. It felt like meaninglessness, like we were building sandcastles on a beach that is endlessly being eroded.
But here is the secret. When you stop fighting impermanence and let it break your heart open, something unexpected happens.
Impermanence does not crush you. It wakes you up.
If time takes everything, then this present moment, this breath, this sacred Now, stands outside of time while it is being lived.
Time is relative. This aliveness is absolute.
Although everything fades, everything is also here right now. A cup of tea with a friend or your elderly dad. A warm few words with a stranger. Sitting under the stars and feeling the miracle of your own body. Playing make believe with your daughter and turning an empty egg carton into a treasure chest. Feeding the cat.
Life is asking you, inviting you, begging you, to be fully here. Time will take its toll, of course. But love is found today, in presence. And presence is all we ever truly have.
You know the sandcastle will be washed away. And yet you still give yourself whole-heartedly to the building of it, to the play, to the joy, to that childlike innocence where the day feels infinite and there are no tomorrows at all.
- Jeff Foster