It seems you can only get the cheap combination of a taco, a bacon burger and fries for a “limited time”. The artificial urgency is supposed to have you rushing to the drive-thru window. It appears there are countless other purchasing opportunities for impulsive types if you’ll only call now or act before time runs out.

Life is full of chances and circumstances and fateful turns and desperate moments that present themselves only for a limited time. Our existence is, in fact, the ultimate race against time, sometimes allocating more hours than you know what to do with and in other situations, time expires before you’ve had the chance to appreciate the moment or say goodbye or even hello.

Two pizzas for a buck, Shamrock Shakes, candy hearts … a limited time. Little boys with Tonka trucks, cute little pigtails, grandmas & grandpas, a limited time. Long sunny days, Holiday cheer, the financial stability that comes with a tax refund – get it while you can. Football season, high school sweethearts, the creative energy that results in coherent sentences … they won’t last and you’ll miss them most when they’re gone.

For every light that begins to burn bright, one or two others dim, flicker and fade into foreverness. This state of temporariness seems most pronounced in January. January is marketed as the season of “new beginnings” but it’s really kind of a gray, overcast bummer, a solemn reminder of the passing of time, of things that you had but have no more. January is thirty days of looking in the rearview mirror, of being overly nostalgic about the old days while trying to rationalize why you made no meaningful new year’s resolution.

So January is just wintertime with no uplifting decorations, a month-long marker that another entire year has just passed. And life is one big limited-time offer.

In general, we are immune to things that are only offered for a limited time because we know that today’s pizza deal will be replaced by an even better deal on McNuggets tomorrow. As a species, we are typically slow to act, to take inventory, to live in the moment and make the most of things as they happen.

Maybe this year will be different? Maybe this will be the year we relax and dig the kids that live with us knowing the “limited-time” rule means they will just show up one day as adults. Maybe we’ll take our job less seriously, figuring out that if it was supposed to fun it wouldn’t be called work and realizing that the only thing that sucks harder than having a job is being jobless.

Maybe we’ll consider the sunny day at the beach a limited-time offer or understand that our team winning may never happen again or appreciate America for what it is instead of poking at what it isn’t (after all, in the history of the world the 250-year American experiment has only been available for a limited time).

That nothing lasts forever is equally good and bad … it means that you may miss out on the seventeen-tacos-for-a-dollar deal, but also that that runny nose will go away at some point.

The turning page of the calendar tells us that time marches on, maybe life would be better if we decided to march along with it, appreciating the journey and taking notes along the way. Should the sun come out this January and your mood take a turn for the better, perhaps it’s something to consider? I may try it, but I think it’s best if we all contemplate these kinds of adult ideas for just a limited time.

Photo on Visualhunt