A moment in time.

My parents spent three days helping us barcode inventory during the prep for our warehouse move in mid January. I'd asked for their help half-jokingly, not expecting them to actually come although my mom does love detail-oriented tasks.

On our last night together, we wrapped up with an Uber Eats dinner at the office. Some of us were standing around wolfing down food, others sitting, taking it a bit slower and enjoying the meal after a long day.

As the team slowly filtered out, it was just me with my mom and dad sitting around, talking about the craziness of what had just transpired and the current turning point for the brand they've watched grow up. My dad recounted how nervous I initially was about the warehouse - learning to run it, the lease payment, all of it. We laughed about all of the missteps along the way and how our biggest problems of the past don't seem nearly as big now.

Later that night, lying in bed and recounting all the events from the last 3 days, I found myself fixating on that moment sitting there with my parents.

The moment became precious precisely because I could feel its impermanence, could sense how it would someday exist only in memory (well...I guess it already is just a memory). And I wondered: Am I appreciating this enough? Am I present enough? As if recognizing time's passage somehow requires you to experience it more completely.

Maybe growing older is just this - being present in a moment while already feeling nostalgic for it. When a takeout dinner and sitting with your parents after a day of boring work suddenly hits you as something you'll desperately miss someday.

I don't know what to call this feeling. It's not quite sadness. It's not exactly joy either. It lives somewhere between being grateful for what you have and knowing you'll lose it. And maybe that's the point… that truly being present means accepting that nothing lasts, and somehow that makes everything matter more.