I said it.

The words were out of my mouth before I could catch them and reel them back. The phrase that instantly dates me and makes teenage eyes roll.

I bet good money you've said it, too.

Probably recently.

"I can't believe how fast this year's going! Followed immediately by: We're already halfway through."

I grew up hearing that phrase. My mother said it over the kitchen sink, said it at every birthday, said it watching the news, and every single time I rolled my eyes — inwardly, because I valued my welfare — and thought, "You are sooo old."

I did not, in those days, believe time was fast. Time crept. Time crawled. I couldn't wait for school to be out. Then I couldn't wait for it to start back up. I couldn't wait for my birthday, for Christmas, to get my driver's license, for Basic Training to end, to leave for college, to graduate from college... My whole childhood was one long waiting room, and the clock on the wall never moved fast enough.

I understand now what I didn't then. Time crept because I was never actually in it. I was always leaning past the day I was standing in, leaning toward the next milestone, the next version of my life that hadn't arrived yet. You can't feel a day go by when you're already living in the one after it. The slowness wasn't the time. It was me, never quite present for it.

At some point that flipped. (I don't know exactly when, but I suspect it was my thirtieth birthday when my birthday candles activated the smoke alarm.) One ordinary morning I became the woman saying the thing my mother said. And here's what I've come to believe: time goes fast now because I finally stopped waiting. I'm in the days instead of ahead of them. Time flies when you're having fun, right?

My mother wasn't old. (Well...) She was present. That eye-roll phrase was never about decline, it was the voice of someone who had stopped jumping ahead in her own life and lived inside the day she was in. And now, all these years later, she's still speaking. Every time the words leave my mouth, she's there in them. The thing I mocked turned out to be an inheritance. Who knew?

Yes, some of those moments I rushed toward carried me away from people and places I can't get back to. The year is fast, and not all of it is gentle. I won't pretend otherwise. But none of it is lost, either. Every quick day is gathered up, woven into what we've become. The half a year already behind us isn't gone. It's inside us.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that you'd catch yourself in the middle of one of these fast, ordinary days, and instead of mourning the speed with which it passes, let it tell you the truth: you are here, you are present, you are in it. Stop leaning toward the next anticipated moment just long enough to notice the one you're standing in. It's going by so quickly because it's going somewhere, and so are you. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa