(UNDATED) Author Os Guinness spoke at our church on Sunday morning and challenged us to be attentive to our lives. “Wherever you are,” he told us, “be there.”

The next day, I saw the enchanting and magical “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” In one memorable line, Benjamin says, “Your life is defined by its opportunities — even the ones you miss.” It reminded me what poet Randall Jarrell said: “The ways we miss our lives are life.”

So on Tuesday, I woke up at 6 a.m., filled with resolve to be there in my day.

My college-age daughter took me to catch a seaplane from Seattle back to my home on Orcas Island. I asked her to stay and chat for a while. She was eager to do so, and talked excitedly about her dreams and plans. In the background, “Good Morning America” announced a breaking story about the supposed reappearance of Olivia Newton John’s former boyfriend.

“Who in the heck decided this is news?” I thought to myself. “Who cares?” Yet my eyes kept wandering over to the television screen, and my attention diverted away from my daughter’s passionate chatter.

She busted me. “Daddy,” she said, obviously disappointed, “I thought you wanted to talk with me.”

So much for being there.

“Benjamin Button” starts in the hospital with a dying woman revealing her life secrets to her daughter. I watched it on the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death. She spent the last years of her life slipping away from us due to Alzheimer’s.

Mom and I were a lot alike, and as a result we often clashed. I sat in the darkened theatre watching the last conversation of a daughter with her mother and thought of all the wasted moments I should have spent, or could have spent more wisely, with my mom.

As I climbed into the seaplane for the flight home, the pilot hands me earplugs and invites me to sit in the cockpit. I’m torn because I usually spend the one-hour flight with my New York Times.

“It is going to be a clear, beautiful flight — you’ll be able to see forever,” he tells me. I decide to read The Times later and “be there” for the experience.

We take off across Lake Union with Seattle’s Space Needle behind us. We fly across a marina full of wintering sailboats. We’re flying at about 2,500 feet and I can see a heron skimming the surface of the water below.

Little wisps of clouds dot the otherwise blue sky and I see the snowcapped Olympic Peninsula Mountain Range to the West, the Cascade Mountain range to the East and Mount Baker looming large to the Northeast, just south of the Canadian border.

Over Whidbey Island I see the lot my friend bought 10 years ago. He died five years ago, before he could enjoy it. I realize I haven’t talked to his wife since the funeral.

We fly over Fisherman’s Bay on Lopez Island and I see tiny dots — people strolling along the beach in the crisp chill of dawn. We land at a shuttered seaside resort where a lone boat bobs in the expansive marina.

Weirdly enough, the lyrics of a Barry Manilow song are ringing in my head: “All the time, all the wasted time, all the years, waiting for a sign; to think I had it all, all the time.”

And then I remember the postcard Benjamin Button sent to his daughter.

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late … to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same; there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)