I’m not sure why, as a child, I remember being conscious of the fragility of every moment. Perhaps it was, when I was 10, watching my father grieve for his only sister, a loss I felt but didn’t fully understand. He’d devoted a year of his life to helping care for her, as she lost her battle with cancer. Her husband had died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack and her children were young adults, still both finishing school.

When she died, my father was inconsolable and his pain was something we could see and feel and touch, but not heal. While I didn’t fully understand, I did recognize, on some level, that every moment is, as I would now say, unique and non-repeatable.

I can vividly recall as a child thinking that I had to “save” a moment, to hold onto it, to never forget it, aware that it might never come again. One of those memories is sitting on my dad’s lap. He was very devout and made sure to pray every day, which he often did while sitting in a particular chair at the dining room table, always sideways on the chair, facing the big windows in the living room. If there was something I wanted to talk to him about, that was the moment that I would plant myself on his lap and loop one arm around his neck. One of those times I thought,”I have to remember this, just this moment.” And I did and I have.

My moments collection includes so many others, nursing my children in the middle of the night, inhaling the scent of their sweet baby heads, feeling their tiny fingers holding onto me so tightly. I’ve held onto so many moments with my husband, preserving forever the look in his eyes and expression on his face. Even with my brother, who I thought would be with me forever, I consciously “saved” a moment, standing by the pool in the backyard of his home, his tight hug conveying to me a lifetime of sibling love and support, the intensity of feeling that we were all each other had, with both our parents gone so young.

We live our lives, many of us, at breakneck speed. We fill every second, cramming it tightly with all that we have to do and need to do and want to do. There is always tomorrow or next week or next month. But the truth is that nothing stays the same, everything is constantly changing. Holding onto those moments, those sensations and memories, recognizing them as the treasures that they are, enables us to continue to fill our full hearts.