Coffee and a Smile: The Way Morning Arrives Without Asking Permission

“Time is never time at all, You can never ever leave, Without leaving a piece of youth” – The Smashing Pumpkins

Time and perspective are two of the greatest commodities that you can have. Especially when reminded of the harsh, but also beautiful reality that your time is limited. It’s the old cliche: putting things off, trusting time will wait for you. But when your life completely changes within a few months, weeks, days, and even seconds – how you choose to spend your time can be the greatest gift, and also the greatest gift you can give.

Time is strange like that. It can feel both endless and fleeting all at once. When you’re lying in a hospital bed unsure of the future – time sure creeps leisurely at an uncomfortable pace. You’re in such discomfort that you’re counting the minutes until your nighttime meds so that you MAYBE get a few hours of sleep, and in the interim – some relief. Alternatively when watching your children grow older – it feels ephemeral – like trying to carry water with nothing but your hands. And more than anything – you just wish you had more of it.

We’re probably all a little guilty of spending too much of our lives in a constant rush, moving like busy bees from one obligation to the next, filling our days with work, emails, and the pursuit of building something more for our careers and the pursuit of a better life. There is always another goal, another task, another step forward that feels urgent and necessary. In the process, time gets neatly packaged into productivity, measured by what we accomplish rather than how we actually live it. And before we even realize it, the days blur together, not because we were not busy, but because we were too busy to notice them passing.

There’s a sense of losing yourself when you’re alone in the darkness, like you don’t quite recognize the person you’ve become. It’s a disconnected feeling in a time when connection feels like your only lifeline. And yet, somehow, that connection shows up anyway. In the voices of family who refuse to let you drift too far, in the steady presence of friends who sit with you even when there are no answers, and even in the quiet kindness of strangers who have no reason to care but choose to anyway. It’s a strange tension, feeling so far from yourself while being held together by the people around you. And in those moments, even when you can’t find yourself, you begin to realize you’re not as alone as it feels – and the darkness won’t last forever.

Photo: Mike Haley

There’s a near blinding brightness when you walk outside for the first time in weeks. When you’ve been staring at four walls for the many days preceding, the color of the grass at first sight is the greenest you’ve ever seen. And it sure is welcomed… Funny thing is, the grass is the same grass it’s been for years – it didn’t change, my perspective did.

I’m writing this from the comforts of my home now. In my office early in the morning. The window in front of me facing the east and the rise of the sun and the beginning of a new day. For the past few months it felt like the sun would never rise again – even when it did. But that perspective has since changed as well. Nothing about the sunrise is different, how I choose to see it is.

“Ok, well let’s GO”