By Dawn Onley

Nothing is worth more than this day. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not your birthday later this year. Nothing.

That’s because today is all we truly have – and some of us won’t even have this full day.

Today is a gift worth more than the rarest diamond, a house in Paris, or a vacation around the world. In fact, today is worth more than all of the money in the world, because today is priceless. So is tomorrow. Every day is. Time is our most valuable commodity. We can lose and regain all of the stuff that money buys, but time is the only thing that we can’t get more of.

The vital question we all need to ask ourselves is this: how am I capitalizing off of my time?

I use to spend a good chunk of the week waiting for the weekends – as if fun was relegated to two days a week. I wasn’t enjoying the beauty of a random week night.

I wasn’t fully engaged in the present.

We should always spend more time in the present moment than we spend anywhere else. When we are in the moment, we are not thinking, we are being.

When we view life in the moment, we don’t take a second for granted.

I’m not fully there yet, but I’m working on it. The good news is I no longer live in the past. I haven’t lived there in quite some time. I have taken the lessons from my past and have been pretty good at applying them to my present situation. This doesn’t mean I have mastered all of these lessons or that I don’t still fail from time to time, because I do. What it means is my response is different. I have grown and I respond differently than I use to.

I won’t always get to sing a song with my baby on his way to school. Or read him a bedtime story.

I won’t always get to hear my parent’s stories or hear my Nana’s laughter.

Today is all I have. It is all we have. Make it count.