Quotable Quotes for Sustainable Serenity 9.23.12

Maybe you are like me, and when you were 10, you routinely read your parents’ copy of Reader’s Digest. My favorite page was “Quotable Quotes.” Perhaps this is where I got my inspiration to start a chapbook of quotes and words of wisdom to help guide me to best overcome the adversity of life with grace and determination.

One of many favorites among the poems of Robert Frost:

Nature’s First Green is Gold

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

To me, this poem reminds me to cherish the good times, those golden moments of happiness. Scores of folks have written about the fleeting nature of joy. It’s not meant to sound morbid. How realistic is it to expect to be experience true happiness all the time?

This poem also reminds me, as a parent, to cherish those golden moments of every stage of a growing child’s life. This is more difficult to do when you are juggling a lot of the day-to-day tasks. However, it isn’t impossible. Sometimes it’s stopping to listen to something your child notices, discovers, or makes an insightful observation for the first time. Sometimes it is simply seeing something positive that your child does for the first time. Hold on to that “newness” and the blissful nature of it, before “Eden sinks to grief”. Before you know it, that age and stage is over and s/he is a year older. Nothing gold can stay.

Appreciating these golden moments will make you rich!

~Aimee, TFF