Moment by Moment

Choosing to stay in the present moment can look and feel like denial. 

It’s just over a year since our son, Tom, was diagnosed with a rare cancer. I am thankful to say he is on the other side of multiple surgeries and a brutal treatment regime and is living cancer free. 

When it happened, we were starting to get back to normal life post pandemic. He called to tell us the news and my response was to say something like, ‘It’s important to stay in the present.’ It was my knee jerk response. My heart had stopped beating.

I instinctively knew I couldn’t let myself imagine the worst. If I did I would be picking flowers for a wreath and choosing songs for the funeral. In that moment I felt it was crucial to be in the moment. It wasn’t going to help to imagine the worst.

A little voice in my head kept telling me I was in denial. Maybe I was in denial about being in denial. Perhaps what I thought of as staying in the moment was avoiding reality. What I needed was to be a realist, look at the facts.

The voice in my head is from my childhood. I tended to see the good in things. I would often be told I was looking at life through rose-coloured glasses. I was a dreamer. It was Polly-Anna positive thinking. I wasn’t being a realist.

My dad was a realist. He was always banging on about living in the real world. He once told me the problem with my husband, Glyn, is he doesn’t build castles in the air, he lives in them. Dad meant it as a criticism but I loved Glyn even more for it. 

The funny thing is my dad spent hours in the garden day-dreaming. He pondered scientific experiments or computations in his head. That was acceptable. That was real. 

When I gazed out of the window and made up stories, using my imagination, I was being frivolous, wasting time, daydreaming. 

Becoming a realist, as I was trained to be, turned me into a freaked out teen who ended up using drugs and alcohol to deal with living in the real world. Staying informed and keeping up with the latest horror news was too much for my sensitive soul. 

When I consider my ‘calm’ reaction to our son’s cancer diagnosis, I am aware of how far I have come from that freaked out teen.

I can accept myself as someone who has faith and lives in hope. It’s not denial. Living in the moment is a choice. 

When I was young I preferred to live anywhere but in the present. I longed for how things used to be or I dreamed about how things could be. Neither of those things brought me any peace. 

Here and now, today. That’s all we have. This moment, and this moment. One after another.

My anxious young heart and mind was changed all those years ago, allowing me to rest in the here and now, when I read an ancient text.

‘Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?’

I was a young mum with a toddler and another on the way. Reading this allowed me to let go of being an anxious freaked out person. To be in the moment. To live each day as it comes. To day dream  and embrace my creativity and become the person I am today.

I have a soft spot for sparrows. They are ordinary, overlooked, common little birds. They live all over the world and have done for thousands of years. I often see them near cafe’s cadging crumbs. A tiny sparrow could feel overlooked and ignored. It could become gloomy and negative. It could worry itself sick over where its next crumb was going to come from. I have never seen a worried sparrow. They are always flitting about happy with the crumbs left by careless humans or bigger more powerful birds.  I don’t think they worry about the world ending or that there will be no more crumbs tomorrow or how they could be eaten by a hawk. They live in the moment.

It’s a daily choice. The media wants you to stay in a constant state of anxiety. To worry about things you have no control over. ‘They’ want you freaked out and looking for a solution. Buy more, cook more, eat more. Spend, spend, spend! 

I won’t live like that. I will keep choosing to live this moment and the next until I have no more moments. 

To be here and now is enough. 

William Shakespeare said it perfectly in Hamlet: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’

I choose to be.