Cherish each moment

I don’t feel like writing today. Life is throwing some big curve balls and the older I get the less ‘hoots’ I have to give.

In my head I’m using another word.

According to Susan David, in her book ‘Emotional Agility,’ our feelings are not facts and we don’t have to believe them.

I can be easily derailed where writing is concerned. I usually have a million excuses for not writing, how I feel being at the top of the list. This year I decided to change things up and let my values drive my creativity rather than my feelings.

I can acknowledge my feelings, and give them room and still honour my commitment to writing, even when I don’t feel like it.

I can take time to process my feelings later and use the little time I have left, before my self imposed deadline ends this month, to write this blog piece.

I have been thinking a lot about time lately. Remember how time felt when we were kids? When I was nine I thought my tenth birthday would never come around. Time seemed to go on and on endlessly.

Summer holidays lasted forever and I felt bored a lot of the time, unless I had a good book to read.

School days dragged on endlessly. The school bell would take forever to ring and let us all out to play.

Time felt long and elastic and never ending. We had an abundance of time when we were young.

When my dad turned seventy, in February 2000, he told me the older he got, the faster time was going. He said it felt like time was slipping through his fingers like sand. Little did we know he had two years left on the planet.

There’s a beautiful song written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus and beautifully preformed in the movie, Mamma Mia. It’s called ‘Slipping through my fingers’

The chorus says:

‘Slipping through my fingers all the time

I try to capture every minute

The feeling in it, slipping through my fingers all the time

Do I really see what’s in her mind?

Each time I think I’m close to knowing

She keeps on growing, slipping through my fingers all the time.’

It never ceases to bring me to tears. My dad was right – as usual. Time does go faster the older we get. I’m almost as old as he was then and time is a precious commodity for me now.

I am thankful for each new day, even with its big emotions, and I cherish the moments. One thing I do know about time is it is finite.

Often when I feel at my lowest I see a rainbow. Today was no exception. On the way home I saw the brightest fullest rainbow I’ve seen for a long time. It felt like it was just for me. This photo does not do it justice.

I will leave you today with a poem from one of my favourite poets, Mary Oliver. Especially the last few lines.

‘Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean —

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?’

Mary Oliver

Thank you for reading my reluctant offering, see you next month.