"It just goes by so fast..."

My stepdad Ed said this to me during his last week on Earth. He was looking at Jonathan and shaking his head in disbelief at how big he was. He looked at me with sadness and wonder in his eyes and said, It just goes by so fast... you just don't know. Ed conveyed so much to me with these words. I've thought about them countless times since. I was sitting on the beach today and I was thinking of how fat I am and how miserable that makes me and how I wish I weren't so fat so I could take off my clothes and go play in the water with my kids (not naked, IN MY SWIMSUIT). I wished that I wasn't so self conscious, and that I did not care about other people thought. I wished that I had not gained so much weight since last summer...and then I thought about how every summer since I was probably about 7 I have sat on the beach and had this same inner dialogue, this same silly conflict. The waves look so fun and refreshing, but I am so weighed down, thinking about what I look like, and what others must think of me... I want to get up but I feel glued to my towel with self-conciousness. I looked over at my daughter, Anna, today, and I was stunned by how beautiful she is. She was playing happily, totally focused on her play, completely unaware of her own body. I watched her walk with so much confidence and poise, and I thought, What a gift these years are! Years where you are free of all this thinking and negative self-talk about your own body. Years where you don't think about your thighs when you walk down to get a bucket of water from the ocean. Years where your swim suit can be so far up your rear, but you don't care, because you don't really see why you should even have to wear clothes anyways... And I sat there, sweating in my clothes, wanting to take Jonathan down to play in the waves, wanting to splash in the surf with my niece Justine. And then, as I watched my two little ones play with my niece and nephew, Ed's words came back to me: It goes by so fast... And I realized: What a gift ALL these years are! How foolish, how wasteful of me to sit on this beautiful day with my beautiful family right in front of me, and to focus on my self and my physical body. Someday my physical body will begin to fail me, and some day it will give out completely like Ed's did. It's inevitable. And what will I think? Will I lie there and look back on all those happy days in the sun, where I sat, in a prison of my own design, and think of how I failed myself, how I failed my kids, how I cheated myself out of a chance for joy? It goes by so fast... meaning childhood, meaning life. How dare I waste one minute in my selfish self-pity? My body works. I'm healthy. I took my coverups off, played in the waves with my niece, got sand where the sun don't shine, got a sunburn, and forgot about myself for an hour. I turned off the nasty voice in my head and made some memories instead. Today was a victory for me.