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A sweet, tender, romantic, endearing, tear-producing, moment.
No, it wasn’t at the top of the Eiffel Tower, or on the beaches of Aruba. But it was, in fact, a stop in my tracks; alter my day, mood-changing, heart-throbbing kind of moment.
Life is littered with all types of Instagram worthy moments. But often, these moments become merely a stream of unconscious ticks on a clock, that go unnervingly unnoticed.
How many articles, blogs, books, movies, songs, sermons, and lectures have been written on this very subject? Seize the day! Life’s too short! Stop and smell the roses. The point of course, is to encourage, uplift, and embolden us as we go through life and to remind us to live in the moment!
Yeah? Well, I say, blah, blah, blah.
I probably had 6 ‘moments’ this morning alone, but if they were before my 2nd cup of coffee, they never stood a chance.
I most likely had another 3-4 more ‘moments’ during work, but they were buried somewhere between my email inbox, and the other end of a lengthy phone conversation.
And in the evening, are the ‘moments’ supposed to come before dinner but after laundry? Or in between a driving lesson, piano lesson, batting lesson or a lesson about not getting your homework done?
If you are a parent, spouse, sibling, son, daughter, employer, worker, friend, volunteer, you know. You get it. You are busy. I am busy. Life is busy. It just is. So to have this pressure to ‘live in the moment’, every minute of every day, is not only unrealistic, but unhealthy. Because the minute we fail to be ‘in the moment’, we start feeling bad about ourselves and measure our moments, or lack of them, by the moments displayed in movies, TV, or on social media feeds.
The truth is, moments come and go. It’s impossible to catch them all. And it is okay.
I, for one, choose to claim my hectic, crazy, less than perfect, insane, busy life. I know this means I will definitely miss a few of those ‘moments’. But I also know, I’ll experience moments that no one else on earth will. Like this last one…
Scott and I, per our usual schedules, are often coming and going with merely a “hello” as we pass each other on the driveway to our next destination. For him, that usually meant the baseball field or our basement, (which is under a massive renovation, done entirely by my husband, that will be worthy of its own post at a later time). And for me, I was often on my way to church, the store, a run, a meeting, or a practice.
It had been a particularly long Sunday; a great Sunday, but definitely long. After being gone over 12 hours, when I walked in the door, the first thing I heard was Scott calling me to go into the basement. I was tired and just wanted to get off my feet. And the very last place I wanted to go was into our heavily under construction, torn up, can’t find the ground to walk on due to the mess – basement. I went anyway.
And there was Scott, face mask on, drill in hand, wearing his 2nd shirt of the day so I was told, as he had been in the basement, working the same 12 hours I had been gone. He approached me and smiled. He pulled out his phone, turned on a song, and took my hand. “Can I have this dance?”
So amidst the sea of scattered sheetrock screws on the floor, and the sawdust floating in the air; alongside the piles of pink insulation and the hand drawn paper blueprints tacked to the walls, we danced.
Now we are both known to be a bit on the sappy side anyway, but when the lyrics started playing to “Die A Happy Man” by Thomas Rhett, and we looked into each other’s eyes, that was our moment. It didn’t matter how busy we were, or how long our day had been, or the mess surrounding us in the basement. We both made time, right then, to share a tender moment.
Maybe I missed a dozen others that day, but I certainly didn’t miss that one.
“Life Is Not Measured By the Number of Breaths We Take, But By the Moments That Take Our Breath Away”
