A gentle reminder not to take anything for granted.  Love, health, prosperity, freedom, peace, democracy.  The insidious way things we benefit from or cherish can slip away without our noticing, until they’re gone. 

I scarcely saw this change for what it was, but that is how real losses occur: invisibly, cumulatively, in a way one cannot grasp or measure.  Only afterwards you see that the snow has melted, that autumn has somehow become winter, that the evening or the past is over. 

I don’t know what the solution is except to be conscious of what we have and actively nurture it. 

Source: Adam Nicolson, Sissinghurst: An unfinished history (London: Harper Press, 2009), p. 30

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