This evening, I was snuggling with my daughter as I usually do for about 10 minutes every night and a quote that I’d read the other day hit me, “At some point of your childhood you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” This quote has been a point of meditation and reflection since it floated across my Instagram. As I was laying with my daughter, watching her drift off to sleep, I began thinking about when the last time will be that she’ll want to participate in our 10 minute snuggles before bed and how I’ll feel when that day comes.
I also started thinking about what life would feel like if I embraced every moment through this lens, that there will, in fact, be a last time for everything I’m able to experience here on this Earth. So often, we don’t really live life through the lens of death and while this may sound morbid to some, I actually think it is a practice I want to start utilizing in my every day experience. When we learn to feel everything as though we know it will cease to be at some point, we can really enter the moment fully and feel it. We can appreciate it with our entire being rather than focusing on the next thing to be done assuming that we’ll have many more opportunities to do whatever we are doing because after all we’ve previously done it many times.
Viewing life in this way allows us to stop taking sacred moments for granted and allows us to be fully present in our lives. It allows us to let each moment soak into our core. In allowing life to touch us in this way, we grow to know what matters and refocus our energy in more effective ways. Lying with my daughter tonight and feeling the experience so deeply made me think about the times where I was stressed and wishing for those moments to go by quickly so I could “go relax,” which makes me really sad for not knowing any better at the time. Parenting can be overwhelming at times and though I know those times were just a sign of this, I can’t help but feel slightly regretful for those moments.
Many of you are living those moments right now… counting down the minutes before bed time so that you can relax with your glass of wine and re-enter your own version of peace. I see the memes on social media and I know how real this is because I once, regretfully, did this. I once wished for her to fall asleep so that I could have “me time,” but in learning to love, see, and experience life differently, I’m grateful that I can now simply be in the moments with all of their beauty, not wishing to be anywhere else, but where I am.
It took slowing down and learning to simply be with myself for me to be with others and in my own experience in this way. Often, when we’re going through life hurt, our walls are so high and so thick that they don’t let life in. It’s only when we take the time to acknowledge the walls we’ve built, our inability to feel deeply, and begin to remove some of the cinderblocks that things change. When we can open to life, life opens to us and allows us to be with her in the depth that allows us to be changed by each moment. When we let it in and allow it to shape us, is when we are sculpted into the beauty that we were always meant to exude.
Tonight, I’m feeling amazingly grateful for this new found super power. The ability to stay open to life and allow all that is exactly as it is without diminishing it by being too far into the future or ruminating on the past is a super power that I want to help cultivate in others. I want everyone to be able to “stop and smell the roses” within their lives and wake up to the fact that each breath is a blessing that should be held with gratitude and reverence. After all, we don’t know when the last time we’ll get to play will be, so play now while you still have the time!
Do you remember the last time you went outside to play? Tell me about the most recent moment that you were fully present in and how it felt different than usual.