Just this moment
On lessons from my children
Someone asked me earlier this week how things were going and all I could say was ‘wild’.
The usual ‘ok’ or ‘fine thanks’ failed to materialise, all I could do was laugh a little too loudly and repeat that things feel wild. The person smiled and said, ‘Yep, wild is the word right now, isn’t it.’
There seems to be an undercurrent of gloom and despair that is rippling below the surface for many people right now. For me, it feels like a simmering pan that I can see will boil over but I can’t get there in time to remove it from the heat.
Work has been uncertain for a while and it has prompted me to ask some big questions of myself. The constant hustle to keep putting myself out there, to keep chasing things while being ghosted or simply never hearing back, to keep trying to find more ways to make an income is exhausting, relentless and for want of a better word, wild.
I watch as my own boiling pan of worry threatens to spill.
And then I get a reality check of witnessing what is taking place across the world and remind myself of all the privilege I have right now, of the safety and comfort we have as a family when others are in desperate need of the most basic of things.
My own children also provide a massive reality check. I still can’t quite get over what a gift it is to watch them thrive and grow, even when I feel like things are fraying and unravelling.
I am continually humbled and heartened by the way they make sense of things, by how they remind me of quiet everyday miracles of what it is to be alive and by all the things that they teach me. Out of the mouth of babes as they say.
Earlier this week, one of my kids was very quiet and pensive and it made the hairs on my neck prickle. I could feel my parental worry barometer starting to rise and I asked them if they were ok. My heart and stomach jumping and lurching ahead to try and anticipate all the worries that I could think of that might be in their orbit right now.
And yet, they stretched and smiled, ‘Yeah Mum, I’m just processing the world for a moment.’
‘I’m just processing the world for a moment.’
Oh how I needed to be reminded to do this.
To take a moment to just process things.
To take a moment to be quiet and thoughtful.
Sitting in the moment, just processing, feels like a quiet resistance and wholly necessary antidote to the roaring and raging velocity of the world right now.
And a timely reminder of what it means to be alive.
Out the mouth of babes indeed.
*In wonderful synchronicity earlier this morning in co-writing, I pulled the word MOMENT.