relativity of time as a father

it's so crazy how time seems to speed up every year. Einstein was quoted as saying "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

This can definitely be said about being a father too. Since I've had kids, time seems to be moving at full throttle. You're constantly on the move with no time to really relax and realize how much time has past. It's nice to sit back once in a while and reflect on life and slow it down a little. As a parent you really start to appreciate these rare moments. And in these moments of reflection, time tends to move even faster. How unfortunate that once you really start to live life to the fullest it passes by that much faster. Live in the present, enjoy your time on this earth. It seems to be both a gift and a tragedy all rolled into one.

If only we knew why we were here. Of course that is the big question, but too deep for this conversation. I've been reading a great book that my sister bought me for Christmas entitled A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The author does a great job of describing complex physics and astronomy in a very romantic way that appeals to a layman like me. Whenever I read about the universe and it's creation and space/time it really starts to make me wonder about our place in the universe and how amazing our situation is and how lucky we are to be here. We seem to just be a big, unlikely, cosmic accident that was waiting to happen. "To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99%-are no longer around. Life on earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it." "Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the earth's mountains and rivers, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enought to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result, eventually, asoundingly, and all too briefly,-in you. "

Apparently we are a miracle!