In the very first edition of this newsletter, I wrote about the meaning of the word home (you can read it here).
You can move into a new house in a day, but it usually takes much longer for that house to finally feel like home. Because home isn’t really a place. It’s a feeling.
It can feel like home when you walk through your front door. It can feel like home when your plane lands in the city where you grew up. It can feel like home when you’re with certain people.
And sometimes, home is something familiar that remains constant even while everything else around you keeps changing.
For the last decade, one of those constants for my wife and I was our dog, Presley.
Presley has been with us through a move across the country, career changes, celebrations, difficult seasons, and eventually the growth of our family. Despite everything that changed over the last decade, she was there.
She was home.
This past week, we unexpectedly lost Presley following complications from what should have been a routine veterinary procedure. Despite her small size, her absence has made our house feel quite empty right now.
A few weeks ago, I shared some of the books that have most influenced me (you can read it here). One of them was Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks. There's a passage in the book that I’ve returned to periodically since I first read it:
“Our lives, thanks to their finitude, are inevitably full of activities that we’re doing for the very last time. Just as there will be a final occasion on which I pick up my son...there will be a last time that you visit your childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend. Yet usually there’ll be no way to know, in the moment itself, that you’re doing it for the last time.”
Everything we do in life, eventually, we will do for the last time.
There will be a last time you talk to one of your parents. A last time you rock your child to sleep. A last day you walk into a job you've spent years doing. A last dinner with certain friends. A last walk around your neighborhood.
And yes, a last time you curl up on the couch with your dog.
The difficult part is that we rarely know we're experiencing the last time while it's happening. Only afterward does an ordinary moment become something we would give almost anything to experience once more.
Some of the moments we miss most aren't the ones that seemed significant while they were happening. They're the ordinary ones we assumed we'd get to experience again.
I don't think it's realistic (or probably even healthy) to move through every moment of our lives wondering whether it might be the last. I don’t think the goal is to make ourselves anxious about losing what we love. But I do think it’s valuable to occasionally let the possibility of losing it remind us to appreciate that it’s still here.
So I don't have much of a lesson this week. Maybe it’s more of an invitation.
Notice something in your life today that you’d deeply miss if it were gone tomorrow and appreciate it while it’s still here.
Stay in the conversation a little longer. Put the phone down. Take the walk. Give the hug. Scratch behind the ears.
You don't have to treat every moment like it's the last, but every once in a while, it might be worth remembering that someday, one of them will be.
Rest easy, Presley.
Or as our son, Grayson, would say, “Whee Whee.”
