Remember when you were a kid and everything seemed new and fascinating? (If you’re a kid reading this, be patient and stay with me.) I remember growing up in Wyoming and being amazed by how snowflakes sparkled in frigid air like little diamonds on a sunny day after a fresh snowfall.
I remember standing at the edge of the prairie behind our house watching a sunset paint the horizon in pinks, oranges, deep blues, and crimson and realizing it was a fine and beautiful thing to live in this world even if I was only a tiny part of it.
I was walking the other day when I passed a couple talking in loud, anxious voices. A half-block up the street I could see the object of their concern: an 8- or 9-year-old boy burdened with a backpack and looking back at his parents as each step took him farther away from them.
“Go on, knock on their door,” the adults called out to him as he reluctantly turned into the walkway leading to a neighbor’s doorstep.
A few minutes later, I happened to look down at my feet and spotted a caterpillar on the sidewalk. Maybe an inch long, it was a natural miracle of purplish furry absurdity. After all, what possesses a soft, squishy creature with a top speed of roughly 1/1000th of a mile an hour to cross a sidewalk?
I was thinking less in that moment about the caterpillar’s welfare than I was about its connection to the couple watching their son take his first strides towards independence.
I remember feeling fear, pride, and love watching my daughter walk into a school building for the first time, board a subway car for the first time, walk into her college dormitory room, and walk down a street in New York City.
In each of those moments, I wanted to stay with her and do my best to make sure she was safe and happy with the new experience life had handed her.
Like the parents watching their son head off to school, I knew that if I was by her side, those moments would not be complete for her and could not truly be life lessons helping to guide her from childhood to becoming an adult.
The best I could do is to let her go knowing I had given her tools to live safe and smart and then watch her go, appreciating the privilege of experiencing a defining moment in the life of someone I love.
I don’t know anything about caterpillars, but I know a little about kids, and I’ve learned that if I slow down and appreciate as many passing moments and glimpses of the unusual — like a caterpillar crossing a sidewalk —then I am really living life.
Celebrating or bemoaning the big moments — birthdays, weddings, funerals, divorces, birth, promotions, retirements — helps us book-end the chapters of our lives.
But the tiny fractions of time life is divided into are equally worth savoring. They pass in just a span of seconds, but they remind us that what we really have in this world is our ability to appreciate all that is around us and be astounded (sometimes, mortified) by how our perspective, in many respects, has changed with age and, in others, has remained the same.
I hope the caterpillar made it across the sidewalk and I hope that kid had fun walking to school. I will keep watching sunsets, staring at stars and moonlight dancing on waves, and if you are a kid reading this and you’ve made it this far, I hope you join me.
