Remember your tenth birthday? At the time it was the greatest, most profound moment of your life. But I bet you can barely remember it. If you remember it at all. Do you remember the feeling you had the moment you met your spouse? What about the day your first child was born? Do you carry those intense feelings around with you as you live from day-to-day? Or have they slipped into history, part of a bank of reminiscence that you pull out every once in a while and dust off?

I read this morning that an actor had died. You probably didn’t know him. He was 95. That really is a full life. But when he was in his prime, I was just a boy. About ten. Now I’m nearly fifty. I have no idea where the time goes or how we move through it. But it does. It does every single day. And for the most part we don’t realize it. Until it’s too late. What a tragedy it is that we don’t live like every moment is precious and singular in its place in our lives. That we get wrapped up in the minutia of the machine – worrying ourselves with things like status and ego and how much money we can accumulate instead of seeking out someone new to love in our lives, or creating art, or just laying on the cool grass and being overwhelmed by the stars. Try to remember when you were ten. Consider how fast it goes and what really matters. Chances are, you won’t live to see 95.

Every moment, every breath, a poem.

major sidney freedman

Rest in peace, Major Sidney Freedman.

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Jim Mitchem

Into The Woods
The Demons

Jim Mitchem

Writer. Father to daughters. Husband. Ad man. Raised by wolves. @jmitchem on twitter. First novel, Minor King, out now.

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