I think a great way to approach life is to consider deeply all the moments you can never get back.

To illustrate, let me give you an analogy. For a good chunk of my career I was a Packaging System Engineer with General Mills, providing technical help to the work teams who put cereal into the packages you buy at the store. One of our key pieces of machinery took the filled inner bag of cereal and put it into the box, or carton. It was aptly name the cartoner.

The cartoner had a conveyor of individual buckets that the filled bags were dropped into, and the conveyor never stopped moving when the line was running. When we ran well, every bucket had a bag in it and the cartoner ran non-stop, putting out a finished cereal box every second.

But the machines that put the cereal into the bags, aptly named the baggers, were a problem, and often we’d have cartoner buckets with no cereal bags in them. To stress the operational impact and the need to keep the baggers going, I took to pointing out to my operators that every empty bucket was a missed opportunity that we could never get back. (It probably annoyed the crap out of them, but hey, isn’t that part of an engineer’s job?)

Life is like the cartoner. The important moments are the cartoner buckets, and your time – your presence – is the cereal bag. You either put it in the bucket, or you don’t – but you never get another chance at that particular bucket.

My younger son and I just got back from Webelos camp. I wouldn’t have missed this bucket for a million bucks: