I had been there only once before, a little graveyard at a hard bend on a back road in Wheel, Tennessee. My name is on the gate: Haskins Cemetery. So, when I was traveling alone through Bedford County last week, I decided to turn up Haskins Chapel Road and pay a second visit to those long-gone family members. It is so quiet out there, so disarmingly still, like the last of the interred just buried themselves—shovel and all—and disappeared, unknown to the living world.

I sat alone in that little cemetery for a while thinking on their lives. And mine. Of things gone and here and coming yet. I squinted at their faded dates—born 1811, died 1890—and considered the consequence of time, how what is ancient to me was once, to them, “now.”

It became objectively clear how small it all is, these plans for the future, this shame of the past. What’s come of them will come of us. And we will lay there too some tomorrow. So, do something, anything, in your “now” worthy of the flickering wonder you are today.