{"id":178,"date":"2014-06-23T22:30:31","date_gmt":"2014-06-24T02:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2014-06-24T08:33:09","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T12:33:09","slug":"living-in-the-moment-it-is-all-we-have","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/?p=178","title":{"rendered":"Living in the Moment – It is All We Have"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CCF04102010_00014\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I want to learn more to live in the moment.\u00a0 Little guys seem to know how to do that intuitively, like they have no sense of what\u2019s down the road.\u00a0 Just the joy of the “right now” – a dinosaur pancake on a Saturday morning is splendid enough.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll never forget the time that I walked up on our first-born Christie, when she was not even 2, and happily coloring on the hallway wall.\u00a0 As soon as I appeared, her reverie stopped abruptly, causing her to even startle and catch herself, with the guilty crayon held still in mid-air.<\/p>\n

She knew she was in trouble.\u00a0 Her eyes went wide and her little mouth froze open.\u00a0 Of course, I didn\u2019t discipline her, but I didn\u2019t take a picture of her crayon drawing either.\u00a0 We\u00a0grownups too often are\u00a0 bound to the future, and the proper raising of children, rather than focusing in on what we have right in front of us.\u00a0 A beautiful little girl who had lost herself in a white wall with a crayon in her hand.<\/p>\n

That little girl is all grown up now, a teacher of little ones herself.\"2014<\/a>When I hear her talk about her childhood, there’s so much lovely detail.\u00a0 She has a great memory, and I thoroughly enjoy her recaps of times gone by.\u00a0I have lost\u00a0too many\u00a0of these details that are so vivid to her, and I\u2019m thinking there are at least two reasons why.\u00a0 One reason, of course, is that the memories are hers.\u00a0 Those things happened to her.\u00a0 I was a bystander,\u00a0usually an interested one, but too often, a distracted one. Then there’s a second reason – life itself bombards us with so much to notice.\u00a0 It’s like the experience of a\u00a0baseball fan whose attention is drawn from the game by what’s happening on the big screen<\/a>,\u00a0or\u00a0by the antics of\u00a0some crazy person down the row from\u00a0you,\u00a0or by\u00a0a hawker with just the snack you were\u00a0watching for. There’s so much going on, you miss huge chunks of the baseball game…if you’re like me.<\/p>\n

Life happens at many levels all the time.\u00a0 We choose where we focus our minds…our attention.<\/p>\n

As a parent with small children, attending to their needs was an in-and-out mental work.\u00a0 I could hone in when I needed to be fully there to meet their needs.\u00a0 Learning to quickly discern if they were wet, hungry, tired, hurt, mad.\u00a0 And I would, at times, just be fully involved from the sheer joy of having them in my life.\u00a0 Their babytalk, their discoveries, their accomplishments, their wonder at the world around them, their work and play, their sleeping times.\"n7607486_31797847_6155[1]\"<\/a> Then there were other moments, however, when they were content with their cereal, or toys, or Daddy, and I would focus out \u2013 to a radio program, a phone call, or an idea or problem I was working on silently in my head.<\/p>\n

This being my reality,\u00a0there are\u00a0details\u00a0I don\u2019t remember, or don\u2019t remember well, because, in a way, I really wasn\u2019t there.\u00a0 Not that there is a moral issue necessarily at work here. It\u2019s a reality of having the capacity of both attending to the needs before us, and thinking of other needs, or desires, not yet before us.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of the dichotomies that come to mind when I hear women who want to be stay-at-home moms because they don\u2019t want to miss their children.\u00a0 We can still miss our children, even when they\u2019re hanging on our hips, or taking ballet right in front of us, or reading their first books to us, or playing those soccer games.\u00a0 We can be talking to other moms, thinking about what’s on the schedule\u00a0tomorrow, or sorting out how to deal with a conflicted relationship.\u00a0 We can mentally be very absent from our children.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to miss the people right in front of me anymore.\u00a0 I want to learn to be in the moment…the moments ahead will take care of themselves.<\/p>\n

A Bit of Instructions on How to Live a Good Life – Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It.<\/a><\/p>\n

One Thing Well (the multi-tasking trap)<\/a><\/p>\n

How to Miss a Childhood<\/a><\/p>\n

How to Miss a Moment<\/a><\/p>\n

P.S. My children were little, a couple of decades ago,\u00a0before the internet or cell phones were our constant companions. Our lives were quiet compared to today’s assault on the senses. This is the culture in which they will raise their children. I write this for\u00a0them…not to encourage them to focus on their children in an unhealthy, child-centered way, but to be all there with them.\u00a0And when they must attend to other responsibilities or relationships, to teach their children that others matter, too. We can, joyfully, live in\u00a0the moment – focused, intentional, generous, and aware.<\/p>\n

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I want to learn more to live in the moment.\u00a0 Little guys seem to know how to do that intuitively, like they have no sense of what\u2019s down the road.\u00a0 Just the joy of the “right now” – a dinosaur pancake on a Saturday morning is splendid enough. I\u2019ll never forget the time that I … Continue reading Living in the Moment – It is All We Have<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[147,109,33,31],"tags":[169,167,165,166,161,5,164,168,163,170,162],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-2","category-home-2","category-inspired","category-parenting","tag-be-astonished","tag-distracted","tag-focus","tag-intentional","tag-living-in-the-moment","tag-memories","tag-multi-tasking","tag-pay-attention","tag-raising-children","tag-talk-about-it","tag-time-management"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pauPAB-2S","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/debmillswriter.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}