“Each new moment is a place you’ve never been.”-Mark Strand
While I was searching for a writing prompt for this week’s article, a meme with those words on it jumped out at me. As someone whose ‘busy-buzzy brain’ leaps from thought to thought and activity to activity, lately, I have needed to slow my pace for all kinds of reasons. I am a professional hyphenate whose job titles include social worker-psychotherapist-journalist-interfaith minister-author-speaker-PR and marketing person. In any 24 hour period, I can see clients, write articles, send promotional emails, write social media posts, be interviewed for articles or on podcasts. My mornings are spent taking care of my darling grandchildren before the professional part of my day starts. In between, I actually clean my house, do grocery shopping, laundry, shower, brush my teeth and take time to work out in my living room.
What I have noticed in the past few years is that words, tasks to complete and the stamina to complete them are elusive. I have long said that the mental hard drive is full and the problem isn’t storage, it’s retrieval. I chalk it up to aging and too much on my to-do list. The moments feel all mushed together, rather than being distinct and memorable. It sometimes seems as if a whiteboard has been wiped clean of the words that were inscribed on it.
I have started narrating my actions, such that anyone who witnessed me would think I was on the ‘dark side of the moon’. I do it to remind myself what to do next, and next and next. It usually works. That is the challenge of moment to moment living. The joy of moment to moment living looks like what I have been doing in the past few days that included last minute holiday shopping and catching up with a college friend who called me after the Georgia run-off election. I had been thinking of her since she lives in the Atlanta area and I know how she voted. We celebrated Raphael Warnock’s victory together.
Last night, I was sitting in a booth at Red Robin with my BFF Barb, enjoying an Impossible Burger and sweet potato fries after going to see the newly released film, Spoiler Alert. It was an exquisite love story, starring Jim Parsons, Sally Field, Bill Irwin and Ben Aldridge, about instantaneous attraction, whirlwind courtship, coming out, inviting in, challenges, and devotion in the face of death. See it, but bring tissues. It prompted conversation about aging, love, relationships, and illness; all of the what if and if only mental meanderings and how I want to live the next how ever many years I am granted in this incarnation.
A few days ago was the fourth anniversary of the death of a dear friend on whose support team I was blessed to have been on and whose hand I held when she took her last breath. She would be encouraging me to live audaciously, as she did, not missing a moment. A few years ago as I was speaking with Ondreah, who passed December 9, 2018 she asked what I was doing for my insides, since my self-nurturing activities are usually external, such as going to the gym, writing, being with friends, receiving massage, hugging, and getting a pedicure. She reinforced the importance of meditation. I like to think of everything I do as a meditation. I think she had in mind some more stillness. Hard to do at times, since I am love and life in motion.
We have no clue what or who will show up in our lives on any given day. What if you could walk through that door with a sense of curiosity and childlike wonder and anticipation, welcoming what awaits?
My friends Angi Sullins and Silas Toball created this gorgeous video that many years later, became a doorway to a journey to Ireland where I had never been, except in my dreams and visions.
On this day, I wonder what wonders await.
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