The human heart has about 2 billion beats in a lifetime. That’s about 35 million beats a year, about 100,000 beats a day. How are you going to spend yours?

I’m having a fish fry outside at the Keg in downtown Dells with a friend who comments that she’s busy all day long, but wonders where the day went. We’ve all experienced that feeling after doing chores like laundry and bringing the car in for repair. What’s worse, in my opinion, is the feeling that I’m wasting my heartbeats.

We spend our precious heartbeats scrolling through our phones, waiting for the person we called to take us off hold, watching mindless TV, or worrying. Just like the autumn leaves I see falling and swirling willy-nilly in the wind, time is slipping away for us, too.

I take a bite of my coleslaw while my friend tells the story of her two-year-old grandson and how they had fun washing dishes together. Sure, she had to wipe up the floor later, but I can tell she had as much fun as he did. I, too, am looking forward to seeing my grandsons and celebrating the older one’s birthday. We’re talking about a grand adventure, zip-lining or trying an escape room, but what we do isn’t as important as being together. I scoop up a chunk of my baked potato and wonder what they’ll remember twenty years from now about our time together. Will it be how we played Capture-the-Flag or Ghost-in-the-Graveyard? How we churned homemade ice cream or made a moth trap? Maybe it will be the time we spent last month at my book launch, where they built a miniature village using moss, twigs, and birchbark. Each stage of our lives has its own treasured heartbeats.

Thinking of that reminds me how quickly those stages pass. One heartbeat we’re watching children play pretend with moss and twigs, and the next we’re looking at old pictures, trying to relive precious moments. I squeeze lemon onto my pan-fried fish and flash back to an autumn afternoon when my son was maybe five years old. We raked up the fall leaves and jumped in them. The crunch and smell of the leaves come rushing back to me. We threw them up in the air and they showered down on us. We laughed and grinned. Precious heartbeats.

What makes your heartbeat quicken? What makes it lower? Science shows that time outdoors—‘forest bathing,’ as the Japanese call it—lowers blood pressure, reduces anxiety, and even lengthens life. I know it’s true for me. If I feel stressed, I lace up my hiking boots.

There’s a chill in the air, and the Keg turns on its outdoor heaters. A flock of geese honks overhead, reminding me that summer has slipped away, just like the years do. I finish my beer. My friend and I talk about fun activities we have planned this fall: visiting an apple orchard, a road trip to see the color, and a few more bike rides—all great ways, in our opinion, to spend heartbeats.

We pay the bill and step into the night. An orange crescent moon catches our attention, and we pause to admire its glow. My friend and I reminisce about other brilliant orange moons we’ve seen, each one a heartbeat well spent, a memory tucked away. We don’t control how many beats we’re given or how they’re all spent, but we can choose moments like this—small, ordinary pauses that become extraordinary. The choice is ours, moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat.