“Keep your eyes forward, Mr. Laydon,” the nuns used to say back when I was in grammar school.  Once you heard this, you didn’t dare look anywhere else.

Boy, were we afraid of those nuns.  They used to tell us that our parents signed a paper that gave them permission to hit us if we were bad.  I don’t know if it was true or not but every once in a while we would get a whack from a ruler and we sure didn’t run to our parents crying because we probably would have gotten another one when we got home.  Ahh… the good old days!

How was I, just a mere child with raw knuckles, to know back then that those nuns were, probably unknowingly, giving me some pretty good life advice? 

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Where I live the days are getting shorter and the air is getting crisp and cooler.  As the leaves on the trees paint themselves into a myriad of beautiful colors before they fall to the ground, the birds, squirrels, and other animals outside are getting ready for winter.

There is something so beautiful about this time of year.  The temperature is wonderful – you don’t get baked by the heat of the sun yet you only need to wear a light jacket to stay warm. 

If you have never experienced the fall season, it is something you have to do.  The smell of the fallen leaves is intoxicating.

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Life is so short.

When you think about how much time we really have in our lives, it can be quite humbling to realize how quickly it can go by. 

I am 49.  The odds are that more than half of my life is over.  I am to the point where I can remember things that happened before many of the people that I talk to were born.  This feels very odd as it just seems like yesterday that I was a teenager.

I am now starting to feel like one of the “old guys” I used to know that would give me life advice.  Back then I couldn’t appreciate what they were trying to tell us.  I had no idea what they were talking about and sometimes I even thought they were kind of crazy. 

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