It's a lesson I'm trying to learn from him, this living squarely in the present. I am a planner and a worrier. I torment myself by mentally replaying my past mistakes, wishing I'd been smarter, wishing I'd been stronger, wishing I'd made different choices. I live too often in the realm of what if. I also expend time and mental energy continually trying to anticipate what sort of crouching tiger might be hiding around the next corner.

I leaf through more pages, wondering, remembering, thinking about this watershed year. Life can turn on a dime. The appointment book reinforces my new awareness of this. We plan our days, but we don't control them.

I cannot put words to the feelings within me on the day we brought her out for burial. It is an odd thing to stand so close to life's beginning and life's end. Birth and death are such strange cousins. We carried my mother to the graveyard, shed tears and sang hymns, then returned home, stood over the cradle, smiled, and sang lullabies. . . .

Who chooses the schedules we keep? We do, I guess.

There are tons of things I could and probably should be doing for work right now. But at some point, you have to put it aside and get busy with the things that really matter.

If you could know —if you could always know —when the lasts in life are coming, you'd handle them differently. You'd savor. You'd stop. You'd let nothing else invade the moment.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a month and underestimate what they can do in an hour.

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

It is only right and proper to be moved by the Bible, but present-day reality has so strong a hold over us that even when we try to imagine the past the minor events in our lives immediately wrench us out of our musings, and our own adventures throw us back irrevocably upon our personal feelings—joy, boredom, suffering, anger, or a smile.

You can live to be old or young, but you'll always have moments when you lose your head.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Hardly anybody recognizes the most significant moments of their life at the time they happen.