I've been looking for this photo for awhile.

It's a photo of my mom, myself, and my maternal grandmother. I've been digging into my matrilineage, looking for clues as to where I came from, who I am, not on the surface, but much deeper within me. Who are the women who came before me, who begat me, and is there anything of them I need to bring forth?

It struck me as I was looking at this photo that this was our first family trip to Turkey, in 1979. I was four, about to turn five, my mom would have been 35, and my grannie was about 65 or 66 maybe.

This was the last time my mother saw her own mom. She wouldn't have known that.

We don't stop to think about how much is unknown, because for some of us, that's literally a paralyzing thought, but there is so much we just don't know about what's to come. We talk a great game about living in the present, but a lot of the time, it really just means we ignore our own internal shit. We pretend it doesn't exist, and we live in a comfortably lukewarm bath of nothing changing. We don't change anything, because that gives us the sense that all is well, even though it's a lie.

We allow ourselves to repeatedly forget, over and over again, that time is precious. That all of our connections to people—especially the ones we've felt for a long time—matter. That those connections are the stuff of life, all of them. They matter. They always matter. They're the only thing that does matter.

There is no time. Because the time is now. The time to say I love you, the time to say I miss you, the time to say I have so enjoyed your company, and I am so glad we could spend this time together.

I never got the chance to say that to my grannie. I was too little.

But even at four, my mom told me that the first thing I did when I met my grannie—this was also the first time I ever met her—was run into her arms. Even children know better how to make use of time. Even then, I knew that that was what I needed to do.