Learning to breathe with the passing hours instead of racing against them.
When I turned sixty, I promised myself I would live more boldly — be adventurous, make every minute count, and face sadness and loss with less fear. I wanted to befriend the hard parts of life rather than avoid them.
A couple of years later, I see how easily those promises slip through the hours. Days vanish into routine and distraction.
I recently came across a line from Dr. W. Heartsill Williams: “What did you do today to trade a day of your life?”
The question landed hard. Every lived moment is one we don’t get to renegotiate.
As a death doula, I think often about endings — not only of lives, but of days, moments, and possibilities. Time relentlessly moves forward, whether we notice or not. Each morning is one sunrise closer to my own departure. That awareness doesn’t frighten me. It wakes me up. It reminds me that even if I “waste” time, I’m still participating in the human collective — every moment letting go of a piece of my existence.
There are days when I doom-scroll or drift, when inertia wins.
There are also days I let my mind wander freely, and that wandering feels sacred.
I have learned that both belong — the measure of a life doesn’t have to be in adventure but rather awareness.
Perhaps the invitation isn’t to fill time but to inhabit it — to live inside each moment with curiosity, even when boredom has taken hold. Maybe living fully isn’t about chasing meaning, but about being open to the ordinary. Meeting each day the way I hope to meet death — with presence and a little grace — putting away the scoreboard of what I could have accomplished and to notice time passing through me, to breathe it in and let it go. To be both the traveler and the witness. To live this way is also to practice dying — to watch each moment pass and welcome whatever comes next.
The day doesn’t need to be extraordinary — it only needs to be lived.