I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we spend our time. Our time, which is, after all, the only really valuable currency we have. Our hours are our life, right? It’s both how I allocate those hours and how I feel when I’m in them. Certainly the adult I spend the most time with is Anastasia. It feels frustratingly difficult to actually coordinate with the people I want to see most. There are the people whose paths I cross regularly, most of whom are a complete joy to see: Grace and Whit’s classmates’ parents, people at work, neighbors. But the ability to spend time focused on another person, truly just being with them, is so rare. Especially for me, who is often not mentally in the same place I am physically. Very often I waste the hours I do have thinking about other things, thinking forward or thinking back. The corollary here is that I am not really living my life, of course. There are very few people with whom I’m relieably 100% there, in the moment, not wanting to be somewhere else. This reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s musings on meditation in E,P,L – the absolute agony of 45 minutes alone in her head. That is certainly how I feel!