In my gentle quest to stay Sane and Present, one of the most important habits I’m trying to develop is to notice when I’m NOT either one of those things.
The moments I feel insane (frantically cleaning or taking out the trash when we are five minutes late already) or decidedly unpresent (I stop talking half way through my sentence, my kids have to say my name six times to get a response)….notice those moments, and bring myself back.
The unpresent moments are fascinating to me. Many people look backwards on their life – look into the past and dwell on what coulda, shoulda, woulda been. However, looking backwards while moving forward is not my general orientation in life.
Typically, I’m way ahead of where my feet are.
In the great majority of the unpresent moments I catch, I’m somewhere off in the future. Could be the immediate future - thinking about all I have to do in the next 10 minutes to get all of us out the door for work and school or fantasizing about how someone might react when I share some news with them. Or it could be farther away - plotting my professional plans for next year or decade.
I am a future-oriented person. I’m learning to accept that about myself. Sometimes that’s helpful – I’m a good planner and generally pretty prepared for life’s minor twists and turns. A couple times in my life, I have turned a vision into a reality that brought me great satisfaction. I also (generally) tend to accept what has happened in the past without turning them over and over in my mind.
But sometimes it’s not helpful – not so much because I cogitate things that never happen, but because in doing so I miss out on what IS happening. I am slowly, repeatedly internalizing Thich Nhat Hanh’s wise words: “The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment.”
For example, when I’m snuggling with my son or daughter between book and bedtime, I often find my mind drifting to the future with sentences that begin with “someday”.
Someday she will think she’s too big to snuggle with her Momma.
Someday I will be shorter than him.
Someday she won’t live with us.
Someday he’ll choose his own grown-up family.
Someday I hope I get to see her love her own children.
Occasionally, my future-oriented mind turns toward the very frightening and fragile.
Someday, I may not hear her breathing.
Someday, I could lose him.
My heart pounds to write these words. These are very deep fears that I imagine every parent feels, but that are scary even to admit out loud. Catastrophic thinking seems to be one of the side effects of parenting for me. Sometimes these thoughts move me to tears, right in the middle of that lovely snuggle with my children.
I heard once that having a child is like making the decision to have your heart go walking around outside your body for the rest of your life. I couldn’t agree more.
And then I notice. Notice that I have moved into the future. Notice that I have drifted far from the present moment. So I tune in again. My daughter’s breathing. The smell of her hair. The sweetness of my son's good night kiss. The warmth of his little body, slowly quieting and stilling toward sleep. The quiet of the room around us, with the sounds of my daughter and husband drawing together in her room.
The future will hold what it holds.
I am quite sure if/when one of those fantasy moments arrive, I won’t think “Aha! I am finally here!”
Instead, I am trying to gift myself the ability to say, “I’m so glad I stayed fully awake in the moments I did have.”
As many times as you forget, remember.