Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal

The post that follows has been sitting here in Pika drafts since July, written in a moment of inspiration but never posted because, well, I was probably too busy tidying up my notes in Bear or updating different logs to ever finish or post it. But I’m newly inspired to write after a cleanup and reset prompted by my latest blog post. In July, while on vacation, I was browsing in an op shop and found a little booklet called A Short Guide to a Happy Life by Anna Quindlen, only 50 pages long, most of them photographs. I read it while sitting at the beach on a warmish winter day in Auckland, New Zealand. My daughter and I spread our towels on a patch of grass because the sand was still damp from the night before. We sat in the sunshine together, each reading our own book, until she wandered off looking for seashells. I was overcome by gratitude and love for the beauty that’s all around us that we (I) so often forget and take for granted, and we tend to see our lives through a…