just a momemt

you guys. it's unbearably gorgeous out. for the first time in ages the air is cool and i have had my windows open all day!

my daughter is a junior in pre-veterinary medicine at state, and stopped by last week to do some laundry. she paused to show me a video she had taken with her phone of the end of one of her online lectures by her favorite professor...she said, with awe in her voice, 'he ends every lecture like this... and he really means it. we all love him!'  he stood in an empty lecture hall, teaching remotely, and emphatically said, 'i am so proud of you for taking control of your moments, for capturing them and holding on to them! you must notice your moments and appreciate them, and then you can let them go.' it struck me so viscerally that i immediately wrote it on a post-it and stuck it to my fridge. 

hold on to your moments, and then you can let them go. huh. i am not sure why, but it seems important for me to note that he had an eastern european-ish accent. maybe because in our western "civilization" we seem to live so frantically, leaping from to-do item to to-do item, rarely noticing our moments at all, disregarding them and sweeping them aside. i'm compelled to wonder where he came from that someone taught him that moments are important. i find myself curious about what moments his journey to teaching at a university in north carolina held. 

as a culture, we are rarely in the moment. even as i write this, in the first truly beautiful, fall-ish afternoon we've had this year, listening to the squirrels rustle and watching birds on my feeder, i am not actually in the moment at all. i am busy trying to transcribe it for you. i am turning my moment into something productive and useful, not letting it seep into me like water that cools and soothes. so i am going to stop now, put down my laptop and be present to my life here on the deck, alone in this moment. i am going to capture it, and be grateful for it, and then let it go and move onto the next moment. maybe it will encourage you to enter your own moment. i hope it does.