More life in the moment …
Yesterday I read a little post titled “Sunday Sermon” by
fellow blogger Bob, and it struck me as if it were a common theme I’ve been
hearing for weeks. Oh; it is. He talked about getting past our sense of not
being happy today because we’re thinking about the future and what we want, or
the past and what we had. Then my daughter posted about self-imposed stress and
maybe just letting the kiddos go at their own pace. And my DIL
(daughter-in-law) posted about her upcoming extremely busy and stressful week.
I’m very much a planner and a daydreamer, always thinking about
what’s the next step in the plan, and what haven’t I planned for, and
remembering what life used to be like when I was a twenty-something husband
with a wife and a dog and a condo on the edge of the mountains. Of course I was
a planner and a dreamer back then too, but we had a lot of simple and good
times in between the planning and the dreaming while living a relatively
unencumbered lifestyle. Life has gotten a lot more complicated since then, and these
days we seem to enjoy precious few of those simple and good times we used to
love.
In his message, Blogger Bob related the story of the monk
being chased by a tiger when he suddenly found himself at the edge of a huge
cliff. Facing a choice between certain death and … certain death, he stepped
off into the abyss. Grasping an extended root he briefly interrupted his
journey to his unavoidable fate, and saw that he was facing a beautiful and
luscious strawberry growing from the chasm’s wall. Unable to return to the
brink and face the tiger, and with his strength and grip ebbing away he savored
the beauty, and tasted the fruit, and happily and fully lived his last moment.
We’re all facing certain death. For the monk, it was a
matter of seconds, it was immediate. For us it’s a matter of unknown seconds,
minutes, hours, days, years; it’s a lifetime by whatever measure. How many of
us live in the moment? How many of us take the time to be happy with the
present? It is, after all, a gift. The past is history, we can’t change it. Tomorrow
never really comes. The present, the gift of time, of now, is all we really
have. Kind of a sobering thought.
OK, so now the practical side of me is kicking in. What if I
need work to support my family? What if I want to watch my grandkids grow and
spend time with them? What if I lose someone I love? What if my kids get sick?
What if my dad needs elder care? What if I make it to retirement age? Surely I
need to plan for all this stuff, just in case?
Well yes, I do, but that planning doesn’t need to keep me
from being happy. After all, even God plans. I know it because He has a plan
for each of us, doesn’t He? All of His creation is evidence of His plan. And if
you don’t believe in a Creator or Supreme Being, isn’t a little planning a
useful tool in helping you manage your life and weed out the things you do and
do not want to accomplish? We planned for our kids, and savored the moments of
their births. We planned a monster vacation fifteen years ago, and lived in every
moment of every day. We also had unplanned job changes, and unplanned
illnesses, and scary test results, and we rolled with the punches. We weren’t necessarily
happy but we accepted and dealt with the challenges as they presented
themselves. And here we are.
So, all that being said, I hereby resolve to find happiness
wherever and whenever I can; and not dwell on what I want but don’t have or
what I had a long time ago, as in yesterday. I resolve to plan my work; i.e.,
my life, but only just enough, and joyfully work my plan, while accepting and
engaging in the serendipitous and spontaneous opportunities that constantly
reveal themselves. I resolve to look for, admire the beauty of, and taste the
richness of the strawberries.
Doing my best to welcome serendipity and live in the moments
I’m given …
- Pops
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