Time is a funny thing.

I was just thinking about how weird time is. Ok, I wasn't just thinking about it - I think about it all the time, but days like today make me think about it a little more than usual.

Today is my Dad's birthday (happy birthday Dad!) and birthdays are always a reminder of how time sneaks by, sometimes without notice. I always think of my Dad as a 40-year-old, maybe because that's how I remember him from my younger days. But to think that he's a (few) years older than that now makes me realize just how swiftly years can go by. Today also marks five years since I got home from my mission and that's WEIRD. In a lot of ways, it feels like I have been home for a decade, but in other ways, I feel like I was just turning 21 and heading to Florida a couple months ago. The things I have done and the places I have been since then really puts time into perspective.

It's also strange to me that I have been in Ukraine now for three months. It feels like I just got here, but at the same time, Arizona feels like it was years ago. Like I have been away from there forever. Time is so strange the way it plays tricks with your head.

This week my cousin Camille would have been turning 29. What?? Now that's strange. But instead, she is forever 21. To think that it was almost eight years ago that she died is one of the strangest time phenomenons of my life. I can't believe it's been that long since I have seen her or talked to her when the fact that she's not here still feels so fresh. I remember a conversation my sister Lesli and I had as we were assembling little orange hearts for people to wear at the funeral. We were saying that it was so hard to grasp the fact that she was gone and how we wish we could just snap our fingers and it would be five or six years down the road. Because by then it would be a lot easier to cope with. And here we are now - in what feels like a finger snap away from that slow motion, life-altering day. Yet it feels like a whole different life time that I spent my time connected to her hip. There haven't been very many days since her death that I haven't thought or even dreamt about her. That's about 2,900 days - some of which have felt like an eternity. Time is a funny thing.

I've always said that time goes by slowly the smaller the increment of time. When you are thinking about it in the moment, a minute can tick by so slowly, an hour can drag on and on, and a day can feel like eternity sometimes. But it's always in retrospect that time feels like it has literally flown by. I can look back on a week sometimes and think, "What on earth? It was seriously just Friday a couple days ago." And a month - it's crazy to think about it. It's already the middle of January and it was only a month ago that we were gearing up for the holidays and getting ready to head to Germany. And every time my birthday rolls around, I am abruptly reminded just how quickly a year can go by. Too quickly for my taste, if you wanna know the truth.

Anyway, I don't really know what the point of this post is - I guess I just wanted to get my thoughts out of my head and into visibility. I don't have a poignant moral for my yet again long-winded story. I suppose there can be though. Perhaps I have come to realize (maybe a little too late) that time is valuable and what I fill that time with is what molds and shapes my life and creates memories. I think (no, I know) that I have spent WAY too much time recently sulking and complaining and being generally annoyed with my life and what I am doing with it. And then a year goes by and I have to stop and think, "Great, there went another year. And what do I have to show for it?"

So in a really round about way, perhaps this is a resolution-esque moment for me (although I do NOT believe in new year's resolutions - they are a recipe for failure and total loss of self-esteem for me so all I can do is avoid them). However, I have done a lot of thinking and "soul searching" the last couple of weeks and I think I have come to a not-so-new but rather a resurrected conclusion - that life is gonna go by no matter what I do with it so I may as well do it good. I need to be content with where I am and what I'm doing. Chances are, whatever it is that I am doing is a one time deal and I need to take every advantage of it. Live in the moment, dance, frolic through a field of daisies, sing in the rain - all that good cliche stuff.

So come, let us dance like children of the night!