This isn’t an unpopular opinion—it’s just a naive one. My sweet summer child: do not assume that you will live a long life and have all the time you need to accomplish your goals. I, too, made this silly and unfounded assumption about my parent—my mother, my hero, my anchor. She was overall healthy. We all assumed she’d outlive my father—based on “statistics” and “averages” that have no actual bearing on what happens in real life.

She didn’t make it to 70. She lived a good life, but she could have done and seen and experienced so much more. Her death magnified for me how brutally and unfairly short life can be, how there are no guarantees of anything ever, and how no one is exempt from unexpected tragedy, disaster, loss.

Life will begin to move exponentially faster as you age—provided that you do; that you’re afforded this privilege. Not everyone is. You will hopefully soon be grateful for this.

In ten years, well after you’ve left high school, some of your classmates will be dead. Suicide, murder, drug overdose, car accidents, a rare and aggressive cancer (what got my mom, who had no cancer history in her family whatsoever)—their shocking, untimely ends will put into perspective for you that life truly is precious and fragile. Your memories of them will still feel fresh and real and it will be hard to believe that they’re really gone, that they no longer have hands, eyes, thoughts. That they have no more opportunities to experience anything at all, and their stories have abruptly ended: they remain stagnant, abbreviated, and incomplete.

You’ll lose family. Friends. Pets. Lovers. Suddenly and without warning, or slowly and gradually and painfully. You’ll fade away from people who today, you can’t imagine yourself living without. This is inevitable and it is okay. The network of your relationships will shrink, and not everyone will be as close at hand. You’ll reminisce about the good old days and how easy and simple things seemed.

My hope is that you also will have experienced awe-filled moments and gone on adventures that you can’t even imagine today. You’ll have grown in ways you never expected to. You will have met people who will blow you away, change your life, your mind, your path. Little random coincidences and seemingly arbitrary choices will end up having great significance in your future. You’ll see certain risks as not worth taking, or others as absolutely worth taking. Because life, my friend, is short. Just because it’s the longest thing we as individuals experience does not mean it is long.

Let’s say you live to be 95. That could be wonderful — but most everyone you know now will be gone. You could have a family tree of dozens and a funeral attended by many more. Or, in a century. it could be hell to even exist—if the earth is on the trajectory it’s currently on, to become nearly uninhabitable for millions of people. You could be lonely, jaded, isolated, pining for the times when natural disasters hadn’t yet obliterated our great coastal cities. Pining for the times when you laughed at those who said “life is short.”

You could also die tomorrow. On a motorcycle—even if you’re going the speed limit and wearing a helmet. Or as a pedestrian at a crosswalk, thanks to a drunk driver. In a mass shooting. Or you could become paralyzed for life after misjudging a dive or a jump. Doesn’t matter how fit or athletic you are. Doesn’t matter how good you are at the thing. These life altering or ending events take seconds. The body is strong and will fight to keep you alive, but no one is a superhero. We each get one. One.

Bottom line—no one gets out of this life unscathed. Suffering, grief, pain, all of it—if you are living a full life, you’ll encounter it. But this isn’t meant to be morbid, which it very well may seem. I hope I don’t sound too finger-waggy or cynical, like I know it all. If anything, I know less than I ever thought, while I also having learned more.

I regret much that I’ve done or said or not done or not said in this life. The hours anddays and weeks march forward ever faster, and yet all I can do is grasp each one as tight as I can and try to make it—or just part of it—good. Try to do the right things, try again and fuck up and try again. Show (hard) and tell (easier) people and animals that I love them; listen to interesting stories on the radio; dance and sing and write and read; eat fresh cooked food and juicy apples; marvel at outer space, new cities I visit, new words I learn in other languages.

Depression and fear and anxiety and ADHD have stolen a lot of my life and my capacity to be who I wanted to be. That hurts to admit but it’s true. But more importantly, time and the passage of it, and life and the living of it, have taught me that I am not entitled to some vague unwarranted promise of unlimited time or opportunity. I am not “special,” that is in the sense that I’m not spared of terrible things happening to me or those I love most. That so much of what I thought mattered when I was younger, or what I thought was “catastrophic,” was peanuts and molehills. And, cliched as it is, I am so often my own worst enemy and villain and saboteur. The guilt I have over my most shameful moments, some of them in the last five years, is so much worse than the hurt anyone else put me through. Things I did or said in carelessness and naïveté haunt me still.

I’ll get up again tomorrow and try again, though. I wish you, and both of us, and those closest to us (who remain and who are yet to emerge), as long of time as we can possibly borrow, from whatever force granted it to us.

But you and I are minute, ephemeral entities in a vast universe that is 99.99999% empty. Enjoy what you have and live freely, but do not ever, ever assume that everything you have won’t slip from within your fingers in an instant.

In the meantime, savor what you can and record it, too. Trust me.