Do you know what one of the last things Abraham Lincoln ever said was? As he sat in the box at Ford’s Theatre, waiting for the play to start, Lincoln turned to his wife and said, “How I should like to visit Jerusalem sometime.”
Within minutes, an assassin would fire a bullet into his brain. Within hours, he would be dead.
Just as you have your many reasons for why you are waiting to do this or delaying doing that, Lincoln had his. And yet life has a way of stripping all our reasons bare, of humbling our plans and assumptions. We must live, as Marcus Aurelius said, as if death hangs over us. We must parent this way, too. Because it does hang over us. We cannot put off until tomorrow, he said, what we can do today—whether that’s being good (our highest priority) or telling people we love them or taking them to the places we’ve always wanted to see.