Stepping out of time, leaning into moments
Video Workshop Replay Included Below
If you live to age 70, you’ll get 36,817,200 of these. Minutes.
If you’re 7, digging around in the dirt with a truck or a doll, petting caterpillars or turning a cartwheel over grass, it seems you have all the time in the world.
Actually, thinking back to 7, time was only an adult’s idea.
Lying in grass looking up through a sprawling sycamore, watching clouds morph from elephants into a string of fluffy bees, there was no sense of time. There was only the soft body with its bones pressing into earth, countless leaves, scuttling breezes, pieces of blue sky, and shapes shifting until your mother called you in.
Time is how we humans tame the wild out of the child. Supper time. Bath time. Bed time. School time.
Then, sitting at the table, moving tiny trees of broccoli away from your roasted chicken leg, looking at the painted pattern on the plate, you hear your mother’s voice say, “pay attention”—which is exactly what you were doing.
Paying attention from moment to moment, without the structure of minutes and hours, is all you did before you were taught to focus your attention on clocks and schedules and the need to rush off to the next thing. Oh, how that childmind eventually became busy with thoughts, those bickering voices.
By mid-life, time mostly replaces the moment. Time is fast and furious and there’s never enough of it, is there?
If you happen to be 70, millions of minutes behind you, it may seem like the hands on the clock face are spinning crazy, out of control. You want them to slow. But not stop.
A moment, unlike time, can be deep and spacious, a kind of infinity because it’s always present. The moment is literally always right here, right now.
You are in this moment, the way a seahorse is always in the sea. And yet. Does the seahorse recognize its sea?
As long as you are still in this life, you can savor the sea that is this moment.
In fact, this savoring, this noticing of moments, is what can rescue you, dose by dose, from feeling lost or lonely, griefy or gloomy, unworthy or unseen, frustrated or afraid, regretful or rundown … or, tell me, what feeling is it that haunts you?
Between the press of appointments and the expectations of others, you can look up from whatever you are doing, realize your body’s breathing, notice whatever colors and sounds and scents are there with you, feeling what it means simply to be alive.
When you intentionally notice the moment in which you are immersed, you feel okay, at ease, held in peace, and if you are open to it, even a touch of joy, knowing you are meant to be here. You belong.
Of course, such savoring assumes you’re not sitting in some version of a war zone.
Still, a resettled refugee once told me how the blueness of the sky and the sight of a single high-up bird, gliding effortlessly, made him calm as he hid in banana leaves while his village burned, as he listened for machetes, which he called cutlasses, approaching.
“So beautiful,” he said, “I couldn’t get over how the sky and the bird could be so beautiful when I’d lost so many I loved, and thought I’d be next.”
Loss is built into time. Love and joy and the calm possible in chaos, reside in moments. The moment. This moment.
Video replay: Noticing Joy in Grief Workshop
In May, I was again invited to offer an online grief workshop for the volunteers and supporters of Compassion & Choices (C & C), a national nonprofit expanding health care options that support each person in shaping their unique, end-of-life journey.
The month before, I’d been facilitating my pilot group program, The Joy Experiment. Learning how to notice moments was a key ingredient in working with that small tribe of kindred spirits to navigate grief and make the most of each person’s heartbroken-and-still-beautiful life.
So it made sense to take that grief-transcending tool—the concept of noticing moments—and share it more broadly with the approximately 1,100 people registered for the C & C workshop, Noticing Joy in Grief.
Now posted on YouTube. You can check the workshop video out below.
By the way, you’ll hear me mention a resource I created for my clients called the Take a Break from Grief Self-Care app. If you’d like complimentary access to it, please click the button below.