{"id":12877,"date":"2026-04-29T22:08:28","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T02:08:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/secret-of-adulthood-the-days-are-long-but-the-years-are-short\/"},"modified":"2026-04-29T22:08:28","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T02:08:28","slug":"secret-of-adulthood-the-days-are-long-but-the-years-are-short","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/secret-of-adulthood-the-days-are-long-but-the-years-are-short\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret of Adulthood: The Days Are Long, But the Years Are Short"},"content":{"rendered":"

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An earlier version of this article appeared May 27, 2014<\/h2>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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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.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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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 \u2014 when she went to her junior prom<\/a>, when she graduated from high school<\/a>, when I dropped her at college<\/a>. The days are long, but the years are short.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Queer Eye.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

This line is one of my “Secrets of Adulthood” \u2014 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<\/a><\/em>. But this one \u2014 about the bus, about Eliza, about the dog on the leash \u2014 is one that means the most to me.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/section><\/div>\n

The post Secret of Adulthood: The Days Are Long, But the Years Are Short<\/a> appeared first on Gretchen Rubin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-habits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12877"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12877\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}