“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss

My time with a favorite mug ended this morning when it slipped from my hand and broke into pieces. In the big scheme of things, a broken mug isn’t such a terrible thing, but it felt like it in the moment. I cleaned up the broken bits and went to another mug, as one might expect one to do, but with a sense of loss for something familiar and trusted now no longer part of my life. And sure, it was just a mug.

We go through life accumulating things, and losing things, and then replacing them with something new. A new appliance becomes an old appliance, a new car quickly depreciates into an old car, and so on through this life we build for ourselves. Loss happens as surely as gain does, and all we may do is smile at the memories made while we had something or someone in our lives.

We are in our own life cycle, moving through days as if there will always be another one. When something happens to break that illusion, we may use the lesson to apply more focus and urgency to the day, or maybe use that awareness to simply savor the time we have in the now. We’ll never get this one back again, and we can’t let that realization break us. We may instead be grateful for this opportunity to be more alive while there’s time for such things.