You Can't Always Live in the Moment

Learning to appreciate the moment is one of the greatest gifts Gabrielle has given us, but you can't always "live in the moment,"

(Well, to be accurate, we're always living in the moment, so what I mean to say is ...)

You can't always be "present."

Sometimes you get caught in a rut and need to step back and look at the big picture (past, present, future) in order to get moving again.

Lots of times you get caught up in tasks that require a lot of your mental attention.

Sometimes sports highlights, home reno shows, status updates, and text messages consume your attention like a vortex.

Or your kids, or partner, or family, or friends, or the idiots who drive slow in the fast lane (who totally don't understand that they're cluelessness is like causing a 20+ car jam behind them and when you give them the "Come on!" yell and gesture as you drive past they look at you with that annoyed / condescending/ "learn-how-to-enjoy-the-moment" look on their face) ...  sometimes these people stress you out and you think about how they stress you out, and why they stress you out, and how frequently they stress you out, and how if only ______ ....

Sometimes people talk to you – and they talk and talk and talk – (I'm frequently guilty of this, or so says Amy) and your concentration drifts and you start daydreaming the moment away.

Sometimes (and maybe not as often as we would like) you catch yourself thinking about your last bank statement before you order dessert, or the next drink, or the really good orange juice in the grocery store, and this ignites a series of thoughts that have nothing to do with the moment.

And other times you worry about how things will go, or how they won't go, and what you can do to mitigate heartache and failure and maximize opportunity and the chances for success.

You can't always "live in the moment." You just can't.

But what we're learning is this:

By making an effort to appreciate more "moments" than we did before, it actually becomes something of a habit. And this habit is helping us to not let as moments pass us by, and it's also reminding us that – even though we can't do it all the time – "the moment" is all we got.