My friend Maggie dropped her daughter Emmy off at college this week. They met the roommate, helped her set up her dorm room, did whatever last-minute fussing parents are still allowed to do, and eventually there was nothing left to do but leave. Maggie and her husband got into the car, and he looked at her and said, “Okay, now I’m going to put on Cat Stevens and we can both cry freely.”

And they did.

I still have two years.

Henry starts his junior year of high school in two weeks, which means college isn’t exactly imminent. But apparently that hasn’t stopped me from beginning the countdown. Two more first days of school. Two more summers. A finite number of family vacations. An increasingly small number of weekends when hanging out with us has any chance of winning out over hanging out with his friends. Two years should feel like a long time. If you’re sufficiently committed to the math, you can make it feel like twelve minutes.

I tell myself I’m counting because I want to appreciate it. I want to notice these years while I still have them instead of waking up one morning in an eerily quiet house wondering where they went. But I’m beginning to suspect there’s a point at which appreciating something before it’s gone starts to look a lot like mourning it before it’s gone.

Late August seems particularly designed to bring out this tendency in all of us. Suddenly everything is the last. The last full weekend of summer. The last beach day. The last dinner outside before school starts. We start squeezing meaning out of ordinary moments because the calendar tells us they’re running out.

We’re also living in a moment that practically trains us to do this. We document everything. The first day of school and the last. The first beach day and the last. The annual photo in the same spot. The countdown to graduation. The college drop-off. Our phones make it incredibly easy to preserve our lives, which is wonderful. But they also make it incredibly easy to stand just slightly outside of them, observing ourselves as they’re happening.

I love the photos. I’m not giving those up. I’m grateful for the thousands of completely ordinary moments sitting in my camera roll that I otherwise might have forgotten. But I do wonder whether all this documenting and counting has made us more present, or simply more aware that everything is passing.

What would your life feel like if you stopped watching yourself live it?

There are so many things I can remember doing with my children without being able to identify the last time we did them. There was a last time I carried Henry because he was tired. A last time he reached for my hand without thinking. A last time he needed me to do something he can now do perfectly well himself. None of those moments arrived with an announcement. They just happened, and then at some point they stopped happening.

Had I known, I probably would have tried to memorize them. I might have taken a picture. I certainly would have assigned enormous meaning to them. Instead, I was just his mother, carrying him or holding his hand or doing whatever mundane thing needed to be done that day.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

We talk so much about being present that presence itself can start to feel like another thing we’re supposed to be good at. Appreciate this. Savor this. Remember this. Take the picture. Be grateful. We can become so determined to recognize the significance of our lives that we start narrating them while they’re still happening.

There’s something about Maggie’s story that keeps bringing me back to this. She and her husband didn’t put on Cat Stevens in Emmy’s dorm room. They didn’t ask her to carry the emotional weight of what the moment meant to them. They met the roommate. They helped make the bed. They said goodbye. They let their daughter’s beginning be a beginning.

Then they got in the car.

And then they cried.

Maybe there’s a time for recognizing the ending. It just doesn’t have to begin before the ending actually arrives.

Coaching Corner

We’re in the final days of summer, which makes it tempting to start counting. One more weekend. One more beach day. One more dinner outside before September arrives and everything speeds up again. Maybe you’re counting something bigger too: the years before a child leaves home, the months before a move, the remaining time in a job or a chapter you already know is changing.

And then there’s the pressure to document it. To take the picture. Post the sunset. Capture the “last.” Prove, perhaps even to ourselves, that we appreciated it while it was here.

Take the picture. Or don’t. But pay attention to whether you’re inside the moment or already standing outside of it, turning it into a memory before it’s even over.

You don’t have to turn every ordinary moment into a memory while you’re still living it.

Sometimes you can just be there.

There will be plenty of time for Cat Stevens in the car.