An earlier version of this article appeared May 27, 2014
In all the time I’ve spent studying happiness, habits, and human nature, this one sentence has reached people more than anything else I’ve written: The days are long, but the years are short.
If you’ve heard this line somewhere and wondered where it came from, here I tell the story of a daily ride on the city bus, my daughter Eliza, and an ordinary dog on a leash.
As we rode that bus to school, it hit me: this bus ride was it. This was parenthood. This was the childhood of my darling girl. This was life itself. And I was frittering the time away.
From then on, every morning I thought, “Thank goodness, another chance to ride the bus.” I’ve returned to this realization this at different points in Eliza’s life — when she went to her junior prom, when she graduated from high school, when I dropped her at college. The days are long, but the years are short.
The phrase has spread in ways I didn’t anticipate. It circulates in parenting communities, on LinkedIn, in retirement speeches, in grief writing. It even popped up on the Netflix show Queer Eye. Often it shows up without my name attached, which is a sign of a good aphorism. It gives words to a truth that many people have recognized for themselves.
This line is one of my “Secrets of Adulthood” — the kind of truth that we usually learn through hard experience. I’ve been collecting and writing them for years, and I recently gathered them into a book: Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives. But this one — about the bus, about Eliza, about the dog on the leash — is one that means the most to me.
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