Life is made up of a series of small moments.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realise this. It’s not the big moments, the grand gestures, the jaw dropping experiences that matter most. It’s the small moments. The choice to love not judge, the instinct to hug not chide, the practice of kindness amidst chaos.
While I am all for the highs, the awe, the wonder of life I have learnt that they matter much, much less than the choices we make in the minutes, in the seconds of our everyday life.
Maybe that makes it harder? Or feel harder. How can we put that kind of pressure on ourselves, it’s too much; what happens in the minutes and seconds where we get it wrong? We yell at the kids, we snap at our mother, we laugh in majorly inappropriate situations (a horrifying nervous habit of mine). I fear that I get it wrong more than I get it right.
Yet somehow I am not deterred. Somehow, it feels like if I keep caring about the minutes, the small moments that I will get better at noticing them and my instinctive responses will slowly (and perhaps very slowly) change.
It’s a sentiment to resonates, doesn’t it? To ‘love the moment’ , as Kelly from Be A Fun Mum puts it. We obviously won’t love every moment (I could do without the moments my children would like to talk to me while I am in loo, for example) but to even have the chance to ‘love the moment’ I, we have to be in it, to be present.
It took me a while to realise this.
And I don’t know about your life but my mine is made up of a lot of competing priorities – and for a long while, after becoming a mother especially, I wasn’t really sure how to sift them.
If everything matters, then nothing does.
Over the last couple of years I have found value in spending time setting goals and intentions for the year ahead. The intention to slow down or speed up with work and play, to flex and strengthen my patience muscle (it’s still quite weak), to choose to be gracious not angry. To remember people’s birthdays!
I have a wonderful workbook that was inspired by the late Scott Dinsmore but that I modified to reflect the complexity of life as a mother. A beautiful life yes, but not one where you can start your day with yoga and ease into work. No, there’s a gap. A pause. A time of manoeuvring small people up, fed, dressed and delivered for their day before beginning your own. And we can’t separate the facets of our life – not really. In every moment we are employee or employer, mother, partner, friend, sister, daughter, school parent, and on the list goes. I have been grateful for a way to look at my year, and my life, as the sum of all these parts. More than a ‘word for the year’ but less than a list of goals that set you up to fail. (If you would like a copy then you can email me hello{at}louisaclaire.com and I will send it to you).
And if you’d like to wonder and wander more with lightness, to share in this endeavour then this here blog has a wee Facebook Group, Celebrating the Beautiful Things In Life. Come and join us and together we can make 2017 a year of celebrating beauty and living life lightly?
We don’t have to ‘live our best lives’ (hello, pressure!) but we can choose to live mindfully, to make small differences in our small patches, to love well and generously and to reap the benefits that swells from kindness.
You in?
