Fate or Fate?

My wife asked if I thought we'd still have met if she'd made different choices.  "Not in the same way," I said.  As much as I'd like to believe true love would always have brought us together, the reality is much more important to believe: that whatever mistakes I may have made were worth it, for the life and love I've found now.

A time for sun, a time for rain, a time for sun.

Ready for Rain: Why Seattleites crave the end of Summer.  Exactly this, except a different northwest town.

I had a great summer, I packed in a lot, but not too much.  I'm a total sun-whore.  And yet.... for these same reasons, I welcome the beginning of the long rainy season.  I keep wanting to have a 'stay in my pajamas' day on my weekend, but it keeps turning back to cool and sunny for them.  

It's weird, that pressure they talk about in the article, that stress to do enough in that short time.  It's the same thing that overloads vacations until you need a vacation from them.  It's the same thing I got wrong a few years ago, when I had my first few weeks alone away from the wife and kids in a half dozen years- I felt like there was so much I had to get done- that I didn't enjoy it, and had nothing but disappointment and how little on that list got done.  

I've learned lessons. So I no longer put much into my when-the-kids-aren't-around-and-I-have-time-to-concentrate file on my todolist- because honestly-  there's just never that much time.  And also, though I haven't internalized it, I can remind myself to try to stay in the now- that there's never enough kid-free-time, never enough sun-time, never enough feeling-in-the-mood-to-write time, never enough rainy-pajama-time, and certainly never enough before-they-grow-up time to do everything we want - to do everything we could. What matters is to do things, deliberately, and with time to savor them, and time to reflect on them.

As best we can until the rain comes.