This weekend my thoughts swung between birth and death and what's in between. My family celebrated my Grandpa's 90th birthday and I finished the book The Goldfinch.

The Goldfinch is the best book I've read in a very long time. I felt it after a few chapters, but it was Chapter 12 that punched me in the gut:

That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

When saying goodbye to my Grandma (also 90 years old) she whispered to me:

"It's just not your time."

I assumed she was talking about love and not death. To her my 36 is young. Although I don't always feel that way I chose to believe her.

We cannot control how much time we have here. We can control how we spend it. Read this book now and don't stop. Love people and things around you as hard as you can and don't stop.