For a Moment

I read a meme once and it went along the lines of “People always acknowledge the first time for something but we so easily overlook the last time.  The last time you tuck your child into bed, the last time you drop your child off at school, the last time you gather around with all your friends present, the last time you talk to your mom/dad/brother/sister.  Be thankful, be present”.

That’s not it exactly but you get the jist of the message.  And it is so fundamentally true.

Lives change, children grow, people die, effort is lost and without even realizing it, the last time you’ve done whatever it is you used to do has passed.  That particular meme really impacted me.  Deeply.  It is so so sad but also so so true.  A lot of people spend their lives looking forward with excitement and looking back with regret but rare are those who live in the moment.

How often have you found yourself simply enjoying space with people you love. Listening to the tone of their voice, watching how their eyes wrinkle when they smile, or noticing the way they fidget with the sleeve of their coat.

How often have you gotten busy and cancelled that lunch with an old friend?  Always with the intention of rescheduling but then time slowly slips by and one day you realize it’s been years since you’ve seen your friend and they’ve become more of an acquaintance than a friend.

Being present, really present is difficult.  It takes practice.  It is a conscious choice to forget the last 10 minutes and not think about the next 10 minutes but really pay attention to this very moment.  Once a minute or moment passes, you’ll never get it back.  We only have so many minutes and to turn those into moments leads to a rich life.

I am so very grateful that I started this practice when I did. It has allowed me to appreciate so many moments I knew I would want to look back on and remember, not just what we were doing but the feelings.  The joy, the happiness, the hope.  Without making the conscious choice to acknowledge those feelings, in that moment, I would have just remembered the day but not the impact it had on my soul.

So, if you ever see me just observing, with a soft smile on my face, know I am appreciating the moment.  Observing myself and others around me and just taking it all in.

 

Merry-Go-Round

Remember when you were a kid and parks had merry-go-rounds? Your friends would dare you to hop on while another one would starting twirling you around and around and around until the world passed you by in a blur? Yeah, I remember those too. Those blessed, dizzy-making, accidentswaitingtohappen machines have all been removed from parks now likely because some parent, somewhere, was mad that their child didn’t come with the qualities of a rubber bouncy ball and hit the ground hard instead of bouncing.

Life is a lot like those crazy ass mery-go-rounds.  You hop off of one of those trips around the circle, dizzy as all hell, your world turned upside down and you have no clue how you’re going to walk one step forward, let alone walk for the rest of the day.  Some kids ignore the blanent obstable of the world spinning in their eyes and think, I got this! I’m gonna make a run for it.  They take off, make it all of a half of a step and crash onto their faces.  Other kids stop, take a breath, close their eyes and simply wait for the world to right itself and then take their step and carry on.  Blissfully unaffected by the stomach turning ride they’d just undertaken.

Can you guess which kid I was?  Yeah, patience never has been a virtue of mine.

I am teaching myself to resist the urge to just run head-long into the dizziness. I am encouraging myself to simply close my eyes, acknowledge the moment, remind myself that whatever situation I’m in, whatever I’m feeling isn’t permanent and if I just stop, experience the dizziness and wait, the world will be right when I open my eyes.  I am also teaching myself that I get to dictate when I’m ready to open my eyes.  No one else does.  I don’t need to explain how much time I need to stand there, I don’t need to explain why I need to stand there and I don’t need to adhere to anyone else’s timeline but my own.  I am allowing myself to experience my feelings, acknowledge them and take the time I need to take to get through it.

I am attempting to put this method of thinking into practice in many areas of my life.  Patience with myself.  Allowing myself to be perfectly imperfect.  Not searching for validation of what I’m feeling or the choices I make from other people.  Simply not searching for validation from anyone but myself.  I am practicing speaking good things about myself without having to caveat that with an explanation.  I am acknowledging my areas of weakness and attempting to accept them.  But more importantly, I am practicing being ok with all of this.

I am a good hearted person. Full stop.

I am an intelligent woman.  Full stop.

I have a quick wit.  Full stop.

I am unmotivated.  Full stop.

I am headstrong.  Full stop.

I am me.  Full stop.

 

Weekly Peek: Clear thoughts lead to clear actions

Clear thoughts lead to clear actions.  That is the end line in my horoscope (which I firmly believe in, I’ll have you know).  It appears that the end line changes each week.  In an effort to stay true to the path that I am on, I have decided that each week I’ll craft a “weekly peek” post that is based around my end line in my horoscope.

Clear thoughts lead to clear actions.  What does that even mean?  It sounds like some hippy dippy mumble jumble but it’s not…not really.  I have rarely taken the time to mull something over in my head, toss it this way and that, examine all the angles, question them and draw conclusions.  I’m more the type to make a snap decision and run with it. I am slowly painfully changing that.  Introspective in training, peeps.

Life has thrown a couple of curve balls in the last little while that really makes me stop and think.  Think clearly about what it is I’m supposed to learn because there is obvi something here for me to learn.  I’ve concluded that consequences may be the trend right now.  In the past, I engaged in behaviour with very little thought to the end result and/or the consequence to those actions.  For some reason, I believed that my consequences would be different, you know because I lurve having my cake and eating it too (and dictating EXACTLY what that cake will be).  Recently I watched two people who are close to me go through similar situations but I felt that the consequences didn’t match the situation.  I feel like the gravity or rather the seriousness of their situations was lost on them.  Then epiphany slapped me in the mutherf!#@!$ face!  That is probably how so many people who have cared for me over the years have felt.  The people I hurt with the feelings I ran down all probably felt that my consequences weren’t great enough.  So why did I think that I was so very different from the rest of the world?

Easy. Because I wasn’t thinking clearly.  Without clear thoughts, my actions were muddled as well.  Holy Hannah Batman!  I think we’ve stumbled upon something here!  Without taking the time to really think things through, to understand the motivations and desires of the underlying current, how could I have acknowledged that my actions would be tainted as well?  I don’t think I could have.  Ah ha (see, there really IS a “ah ha” moment)…clear thoughts lead to clear actions.

Clarity of thought to me now means, mulling a thought over and making sure that my intentions are clean and clear.  Thinking it through to make sure that I understand the base reason why that thought even entered my mind in the first place.  So repeat after me: Clear thoughts lead to clear actions.

ps…you’ll probably see the whole consequences thing end up in a rant rock post…just sayin’