On Sunday, we say goodbye to our daughter as she goes back for her junior year at college. We should be used to this by now. We’ve done it twice before, but it’s still not easy – for any of us. After all, she’s a whole airplane ride away (and not even a direct flight). We can console ourselves that she loves her school and at least we’re in the same time zone – making communication just that much easier.

But there’s joy in the sorrow of a goodbye when it’s not permanent and when we’ve deeply appreciated our family time together over the summer.

I’m not a fan of the perspective that pain makes happiness sweeter, or that absence makes presence better. I don’t want to think of life in such transactional, trade-off terms. I do believe however, that being as present as possible every minute is useful. Being grateful also helps – appreciating every moment. We don’t do this perfectly, but I’m satisfied that we do it on a consciously consistent basis.

Could we just have a little more time together? Time is relative – how quickly it moves and how much we perceive that we have – whether we are time rich or time poor. Our daughter, at 20, noted that time goes faster as she gets older. Out of the mouths of babes. My father-in-law used to say: ‘the days go slowly, but the years go fast’.

I read recently[i] that we perceive time to move more slowly (and therefore perceive that we have more of it) when we do things in new ways rather than the same old ways (driving a new route to work, brushing our teeth with our non-dominant hand, etc.). This is because our brains can’t take the short-cuts they’re used to, and when they have to work harder, we perceive time to move more slowly. In addition, we perceive that we have more time overall when we have experiences of awe – that is, experiences in which we have a sense of our smallness within a vast reality. Awe inspires pause and reflection – and this slows time and gives us richness.

We can be in awe of the silhouette of birds against a sunset sky or in the smell of the campfires during a summer evening walk in Michigan. It can be in the sticky juice of peaches that we enjoy in the orchard – a last family hurrah before our daughter goes off to school. It can be in the sound of our children’s laughter as they tease each other. It can be in the light of expectation in our daughter’s eyes – as she heads through security for her flight carrying her over-stuffed bag and sporting her college sweatshirt.

Let us be in awe of each other, of our relationships, and of precious time together – saying goodbye and anticipating the next hello.

[i] In a book called Super Better by Jane McGonigal