Okay, it took me months to finally buy volume II of Trace Adkins Greatest Hits “American Man.” I listen to all kinds of music, including country, and I’ve always liked Adkins, but the main reason I bought this CD was because of the song “You’re Gonna Miss This.” I remember hearing the song several times on the radio earlier in the year and of course I saw Adkins sing the song at the end of Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” I hadn’t listened to the song for a long time and just bought the CD and listened to it a few times already.

It’s the words in the song that really impressed me. The first verse tells of a girl who can’t wait to grow up and her mom tells her she’s going to miss this. The second verse has the girl as a new girlfriend and tells her dad that the little apartment is only temporary as it talks about babies and a bigger house etc. His dad tells him to slow down, he’s going to miss it. The last verse is five years later, with the woman apologizing to the plumber for her busy house with the phone ringing, a baby crying, and another child screaming. He tells her that he doesn’t care because he has two babies, one 36 and the other 23. He tells her that it is hard to believe, but that you are going to miss it.

The chorus after each verse is:

You are going to miss this

You gonna want this back

You will wish these days

It hadn’t happened so fast

These are good times

So take a good look around you

You may not know now

But you are going to miss this

Wow Trace, this song reminds me of another song on the CD, “Songs About Me”. But this song is about all of us.

I find myself thinking about my younger days. Man, I wanted to grow up and get out of high school and get out of the house sometimes when I was young. Wow, I miss some of those days now that I look back. I remember that sometimes I hated the Army. FTA was a battle cry that didn’t mean “Take Top’s advice,” as a friend of mine said to Master Sgt. (Above) one day when he was caught writing initials in the snow behind the barracks. I can remember times in college, times in Japan, times in Korea, many times during law school, when I didn’t want to be there, how I wanted things to change. Now I look back and miss a lot of those moments. Well, maybe not in law school, but now it doesn’t seem as bad as I thought at the time.

Now that I am a parent, this lesson comes even stronger. My little girl, Cosette, is four years old and has just started preschool. She’s growing up really fast and I already miss some of those days when I was little. I still enjoy all the new things we do every day, especially since she is like her dad in the sense that she loves books. She is trying very hard to learn to read and write. On the first day of preschool, she told her teacher that she still couldn’t read well. His teacher told him he was fine, and then he told my wife and me that it wasn’t until kindergarten that they began teaching zoophonics, a system for learning letter sounds and phonemic reading. I thought to myself, “she already knows the sounds all the letters make, by next year and in kindergarten she will be reading. I guess she will be ahead of the curve like me.”

So while I really enjoy helping her with her reading and writing, I also miss some of the things that happen when I was very little now.

But here’s the catch. There are times when I am pressured by work, bills, writing projects, my teaching, and other goals that I work to achieve, that I am shorter with the time I have for it. Tonight, for example, I only have a short time to get home from work, eat, hang out with her, and then go to the gym to train and teach hapkido. I think about the Adkins song and I realize I’m going to miss this. I will miss these times and therefore I have to make sure I take as much time as possible because it is going to pass very quickly.

Everyone tells the younger generation that time passes faster as you get older. They say it because it is true. Each and every year goes faster than the last. It makes the “The time is now, the place is here” lessons that Dan Millman teaches in his Peaceful Warrior trainings even more important. It’s not that they aren’t always important, it’s just that as you get older you pay more attention to them.

Or at least you should. Some people don’t, and that’s sad. Because they are the ones who will probably miss you the most. Lose what? Miss life. I recently wrote about life, after learning of the 41-year-old relative of a friend who died of a heart attack. We must not miss our lives. We should not be too eager to move on to the next stage, because trust me, it is coming too fast, that is if you are lucky enough to move on to the next stage. Many people write about this concept in different ways. I have written about it and I also talk about it. I am sure that I will continue to write and speak on the subject in the future in various ways. Why? Because it is important. It’s very important! I thank Trace Adkins for recording this song written by Lee Thomas Miller and Ashley Gorley to remind us once again how important it is to live life and live in the present. Enjoy what we have, because we will miss it. There are other songs, other books, other lessons on this same topic, and maybe I’ll write about them in the future as well. I’m also glad I bought the CD of another song that I also need to write about. But that’s for another day.

For now, remember, the time is now, the place is here. Live your life. Live now. When you look back, “You’re going to miss this.”