There’s a common question that pops up throughout your life no matter how old you are. “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?”

But what if we rephrased and re-philosophized that question?

What if the question wasn’t “how do you see yourself in 10 years,” but what if it was, “What will be different in your life in 10 years? What won’t you have then that you have now?”

This is a different question. This is not what you hope to be doing in 10 years. The question is, “what will you not have, that you have now?” 

Profound.

So I just asked myself this. In 10 years, what won’t I have, that I have right now?

The conversations with my kids on the way to school.

I could look at the drive to school as something tedious. I have to drive them to school every day, 15 minutes there and back and then pick them up there and back. But those moments are really special to me, because we are together. There’s no distraction. We are in the car, sometimes working on spelling words. Sometimes singing to the latest hits together. Sometimes talking about what we hope for for the day. 

When they come home, they have all these things they want to do. TV, friends, music lessons, baseball practice. When we’re in the car, talking about the day, or talking about how the day is going, it’s just us.

If I stop and think about it I realize that it’s not always going to be like that. But sometimes (most of the time) we don’t stop and think about these types of moments because we become complacent. We just assume it’s always going to be like this because you don’t take the time to think about how special that moment actually is.

When you have kids, it can be easy to get so wrapped up in the day-to-day and the stress of it all and all the moving parts, that you don’t realize that it’s not going to be like this forever. You just assume it is. 

When you slow down and think about your present life compared to what your life will be like in 10 years you kinda get smacked across the head with reality. 

No car rides to school. 

No conversations in the car.

My kids will be 18 and 21, which is bizarre. The first 10 years went really fast. Superfast.

There won’t be those daily morning moments of just us in the car together.

It seems far away, but it’s not.

Live intentionally. Pay attention to the beauty in the everyday moments. Fast-forwarding your mind to when you won’t have those moments brings a new appreciation to them.

There was a time when I used to think, my kids need to learn how to sleep in their own bed, that it’s really important they develop that independence instead of always crawling into ours. Then I realized that there’s going to be a day where they won’t even want to do that so maybe we need to embrace those moments when they’re still young like that.

Every morning when I wake up my kids, I don’t yell, “hey, it’s time to get up.” Instead, I always spend time with them and hug them and tell them that it’s going to be a really good day. I lay with them and make them smile. One could choose to view it as just something I do every single day. But what if it wasn’t just something I did every day but the most important part of my day? What if what my kids remember in 10,20, 30 years is how I woke them up in the morning? The cuddles and the emphasis I put on making sure when they open their eyes for the day, that they feel happy. I hope that when those moments are gone, they remember them, along with the car rides to school, and how I always reminded them to be kind and be a leader.

Think about your life 10 years from now. What will be different? 

In 10 years, it’s not that anything is completely gone. It’s just that many things are going to be different. I think that those who are intentionally “living” see that. Those memories, when the time is gone or an important person to you is gone, you can hang on to them forever. You can always go back to that time in your mind’s eye. There, the moments never die. Those moments become a part of you. Something I hold onto as an adult from my childhood is when my parents were there at every tournament, cheering me on and being super nervous.

It makes what you’re doing in the moment more important.

It makes you feel like you really want to hold on tight to these present moments. 

For me, I know so much will be different that I need to appreciate it all right now.

It just comes down to this realization that we take for granted so many things. They are easy to take for granted because they’re just always there. FOR NOW. Then when you leap forward in your mind and think about it, you realize maybe they’re not always going to be there. And then, looking at it from that perspective, even the simplest of things start to really matter.

It’s easy to take everyday life for granted.  It’s easy to feel stuck in life’s routines and not think any of it is special. We do the same things every day. We see the same people. When we’re wrapped up in the moments, maybe we actually miss the point? But when we shift our perspective like this, it can really make us stop to take a new look at life…

You can look at any of your moments today, and every day, and appreciate that you have them, knowing that one day, you’ll merely be looking back on them.