Life is all memory, except for the present moment that goes by so quick you hardly catch it going. From the play, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams.

The other day I received an amazing email – one that stopped me in my tracks and cut right through the everyday daily noise and empty distractions with which we all deal.

It was a note from an old friend who had lived on the same street as me and attended the same high school – when I was in my early teens and from whom I had not heard a single word since I moved away – fifty years ago.

Like me, he, too, had eventually moved along on his life’s path, living, working,lloving, fixed on a set of conceived and preconceived goals. Then, for some reason, at this juncture, he penned a few brief lines, wondering what was going on in my life. Where was I, he wondered and what was I was up to?

Imagine, for moment, an old school friend of yours contacting you, out of the blue, after all those years and all the living you both had done. What would you say? Where would you even begin to begin? Really.

How would I begin, I thought? The answer could well fill a book. Maybe it will. While his journey and mine are hopefully far from over, I couldn’t help but think of the old axiom that life isn’t about the end game or meeting the goals, it’s about whom you become on the way to meeting them.

It’s at a time like this that you are reminded of how true that is.