It’s a heck of a thing to watch your parents get older. For many of my friends, they chart the passage of time by how fast their kids grow up. But for me, it’s my folks. They can be pretty dynamic people when they want to be — Dad with his hobby obsessions and Mum with her ever-evolving reflections on life and the world.

This isn’t a sad post. Not really. Things are just fine right now and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the temporal progression of my parents while it’s going well. So much of this type of writing happens when things don’t go well, and it feels important to capture the good bits too.

When I visit, my Mum has so much energy and is so excited about the next stages of her life. She wants to have fun and do things that are important to her. My Dad goes out golfing at every opportunity, sings when the mood strikes, and gets excited at the prospect of going on holiday again. I sense the vigour of teenagers in both of them. It reminds me that fresh starts are a state of mind.

Maybe it’s a by-product of my own age, but I wake up every morning and go to bed every night knowing that I won’t get to visit my parents forever. That every chat, every photo, every Wordle score, every Boomer humour joke is something precious, an experience to cherish, even when it frustrates the heck out of me.

How are you with your family? And I mean this in the most inclusive sense of the word — the people connected to you, whether by blood, by adoption, by chance, or by choice. Tell someone in your family that you love them today, because time waits for nothing.