I have been pondering this concept since the writer reached out to me a few weeks ago, because I find it fascinating to think about the opportunity cost of time in different stages of life…Now that her piece is published, I can write more about it.

My first thought: we are all going to die eventually. We might have Four Thousand Weeks (I hope more) but time is ultimately limited. It’s harder to see that early in life, when time feels expansive, and possibly even endless, but the older you are, the more that reality starts to hit.

This is a particular issue for folks who are retired. At least on the middle-to-upper income side of things, sixty-something people often retire with the goal of doing  activities such as travel, hanging out with family and friends, spending time on community endeavors that were tough to do while working full time, eating out, going to matinees, whatever. The goal is to do this for a good long time, but at some point (for many folks), health concerns make it harder to take a trans-Atlantic cruise or take that woodworking class. So there’s always a question of how many healthy retirement years you have available for these pursuits, and how you should distribute these pursuits over these hopefully-numerous-but-possibly-not years.

For certain folks, the 1-2 years (depending on place) when many activities were limited by Covid and Covid restrictions represented a very high proportion of their healthy retirement time. Obviously dying of Covid would end those healthy retirement years completely, so this is a question of calculating risks, but not doing things like visiting family, acting in the local theater group, or traveling to Europe, involved severe trade-offs, given that there may not be much time left to do those things.

Covid isn’t over, but now that there are vaccines, and boosters, and milder variants, some folks are wondering if you can make up for lost time. That’s why Barron’s — a publication aimed at people with portfolios large enough that money is not the primary limiting factor — ran this story.

The short answer is: no. Once a second is gone, it is gone. All the money in the world can’t buy it back. I know some retirees who made certain choices even during the darkest days of Covid — such as continuing to visit family members — precisely because they weren’t willing to accept the risk of for sure not seeing their loved ones vs. the lower percent chance of contracting Covid in its riskier forms. Others made different choices. That is the tough calculus of a pandemic.

But that doesn’t make for a good article, so I did offer some thoughts on how to think about time now. One is to think about what you would have liked to have done in 2020 and 2021, and accelerate the timeline on doing more of that. So, for instance, if you would have taken 2 big trips a year, try taking 3 or 4 per year. If you’d go visit some old friends who live 3 hours away once or twice a year, do that more often. Accept that life will feel a little more “full” now— even “busy.” It balances out the time when it wasn’t full at all. Life goes in phases, and no one phase ever lasts forever.

(Speaking of which, I am flying three times in two weeks — including making good on two talks booked for June 2020 and rescheduled for June 2022. It seems that phase of my life is back…)

Photo: This photo doesn’t have much to do with retirees, or Covid, but I enjoyed that I could see Canada from my Detroit hotel room, and even cooler, I was looking south to see our “northern” neighbor.

I set my alarm for 6:10, intending to nudge the teenager out of bed, so he could take the bus to school. (He shares a room with his little brother, who can sleep a little longer, so we come wake him rather than have him set an alarm that is going to wake his brother too. This will not be the case in the new house thank goodness!). My husband and I had a walk-through meeting at our new house at 7 a.m. with the contractors to take stock of what needs to be fixed before we move in a few weeks from now. Our nanny agreed to come at 6:45 or so.

Well, I woke at 6:40. My alarm was ringing…but silently. I’m still not sure what I did there. My husband was up and in the shower but I guess hadn’t noticed that none of the rest of us were moving (including the teenager). I threw on some clothes, woke the kid up and drove over to the new house while my husband did the school run (since the bus was long gone by that point).

The house is coming along nicely. I trudged through with my coffee, flushing toilets to make sure they worked, turning on faucets and light switches and so forth. We may not have an oven when we move in, but we will have a stove so I guess that’s good. In any case, I was in the midst of that when I got a text from another child who asked if I had the felt and foam half-sphere he needed for an earth science project. What? He’d mentioned something on Friday, but I had not understood that this was needed by Monday morning. He thought I had ordered it or something and then when I was gone when he needed to leave there was general panic.

And so I found myself at Michael’s craft store after the construction walk-through. This was quite the place! They did indeed have foam half spheres. And full spheres. I bought a variety, plus felt for creating the various layers of the earth. And potato chips because I was hungry by this point and not inclined to make healthy breakfast choices. Is there any thing this store doesn’t have??? It’s a good thing I don’t go there often.

Anyway, I drove my bag of stuff over to the middle school and left it with the security guard who has a book shelf for just such forgotten things. Indeed, I saw that there were materials for other children in the same class sitting there.

By the time I got home it was 10:30 a.m. I attempted to get started with work, but wound up needing to deal with the forms to lock in the movers for early January. On the plus side, I learned that the Notes function on an iPhone can scan documents and turn them into PDFs. This is very useful knowledge!

Anyway, we’ll see what I get done over the next few hours before I take two of the kids to get dose #2. The people running the clinic (for 5-11 year olds) have promised a special guest at the post-shot waiting area. So…is it going to be Santa? I’m not sure it’s possible to keep kids socially distanced from Santa, and streams of children all piling on the same guy would be ironic at a Covid vaccine clinic. So maybe it won’t be Santa. One of the area sports team mascots? I’ll report back!

Photo: Colorful felt!

Getting out the door with crowds of people — and occasionally a dog — is just a pain. Is everyone wearing shoes and a coat? Do we have masks if we’ll need them? Do we have a packed diaper bag or at least a diaper and wipes in my purse? Even for shorter trips, everything goes smoother if we have water and snacks. Five kids require a lot of snacks, and then there is never universal happiness with the snacks I have packed. Outings in the Covid era have the additional complication of timed reservations. In general I am not opposed — it forces pre-commitment which, given the pain required to get out the door, is probably a good thing — but it does nudge up the time pressure.

There are, of course, ways to make the process slightly easier. I have taken to simply keeping a packed snack bag in the pantry and occasionally throwing other stuff in it. If you are hungry enough you will take what is on offer. I usually just have a diaper and wipes in my purse (unless I don’t…which was fun for a very messy diaper at Longwood Gardens last weekend!). Shoes and coats are required to be in the mudroom so at least theoretically time won’t be wasted hunting for them.

But there is no way to make the process seamless. Getting out the door is a pain, but if I refused to accept that pain we’d never go anywhere. Which would itself be painful over time. So the reality is that every family trip is going to start with some aggravation, and it will probably start at least a few minutes later than planned. Oh well.

In any case, I enjoyed ice skating and seeing the holiday trains. So at least there’s that!

As the calendar turned to March, it has me thinking about March a year ago. I have been on and off with journal writing over the past three decades (yes, starting at age 12), but I wrote fairly regularly during Kid #5’s first few months as I was trying to remember things. And so I recorded the details of his sleeping (those weeks when it seemed to be getting better from the newborn days!) and then the news turning so dark. It was about a year ago that we had our last normal weekends and weeks with kid activities. There was a middle school musical. Early morning school choir rehearsals. Prepping to get the baby’s passport (which, surprise, we’ve never used…). I sang a concert of very challenging French music with my choir. My husband and I went out to eat at a Mexican restaurant, not knowing we would not eat out again for many months.

As things started getting canceled, as borders and schools closed, as lockdowns went into effect, I wrote in my journal about all this. I have been re-reading these entries now. I mentioned that I was sorry I had read Station Eleven recently. I thought, judging by whatever statistics China was reporting, that the disease itself would be less scary for younger people than the potential breakdown in civil society (which is what happened in Station Eleven…though the Georgia Flu was also 90 percent fatal, so there’s that). Would the grocery supply chain hold up? I wrote of my elation when my husband managed to shop at Wegmans and actually get a lot of the things we needed. Our nanny had previously stockpiled a lot of canned beans and vegetables in our pantry.

A year later, we still have that supply of canned beans and vegetables. I wrote that all of this had to end at some point. We had to emerge on the other side. I had travel plans in April and May, but surely this would all be over by then, right? I didn’t know that the grocery supplies would hold up pretty well, always offering up food that was more palatable than those canned green beans, which is why we never ate them, but a year later my older kids still wouldn’t be back in school full time. As millions of jobs disappeared, I wrote how thankful I was that we could both work from home. I didn’t know that a year later I’d still be eating lunch on many weekdays with my husband, who would convert the guest room into his full-time office.

One of the upsides of a journal is that you write down details that don’t necessarily make it into the history books. For instance, the second week of March was absolutely gorgeous. Spring really accelerated out of February last year, and the temperatures here were in the 70s. That pushed all the buds to blossom. So I wrote of sitting on the porch, holding or nursing the baby, soaking up the flowers, and reading headlines about the world falling apart. It was a strange juxtaposition. At least the kids could play outside all day when the schools closed and no one had yet figured out how distance learning would work. I wrote about my homeschool schedules (remember those?)

A year ago, I wrote in my journal that “my goal is for the kids to look back and think this was an adventure.” I am not sure if they’d feel this way, though I don’t think they’ve had too terrible a time of it. Certainly, we’ve been so much more fortunate than many. We’re all healthy, so far at least. They can play with each other. They’ve enjoyed spending more time with their father, almost to the point of ridiculousness. The other night my husband had to do a video call that absolutely, positively could not be interrupted, so he left the house to do it, and as I was putting everyone to bed, child after child said “wait, where’s Daddy?” They were flummoxed by his disappearance, I guess not remembering that on an average Tuesday a year ago, this would have been normal.

Some things are returning to normal. My mother-in-law is vaccinated. My parents have an appointment for their second vaccine. The baby was supposed to be baptized on March 15, 2020, and this was canceled. It is now rescheduled for an outdoor ceremony in late March. His little white baby baptism outfit doesn’t fit, but he’ll wear something else than he would have a year ago and it will happen, just on a very different timeline than I suspected as I wrote, last March, of those weeks where everything changed.

Photo: Longwood Gardens luminaries