I sit and I watch Pheonyx and Kesa play. Pheonyx is in baby school and Kesa is his teacher. She is saying words to him and he is copying what she says. A little imitator.

This moment is so precious to me as I am fully in it and am aware also that it is passing.

Being present and witnessing moments like these, being fully immersed in them, sometimes leaves me melancholy. I feel gratitude for what is, in the moment, but also a twinge of sadness for the moments I have missed, being too busy rushing around unconscious to his little voice or when he wants to be picked up and I’m doing something else.

But this is life. We cannot always be awake and in the moment and we can’t have our mind on too many tasks at once and stay present and grateful.

As a mom of 4, with one daughter with autism (often in fits of sadness), I am often spread thin and unavailable to the moment. My spirit remembers how easy it was to be present when there was just Autumn and Kesa, or even when Serafina was a baby, but as more lives get added to the family and more duties introduce themselves and make themselves at home in our life, it becomes more difficult.

I used to judge myself a lot for not being present enough or for looking back and wishing I was not so into my own self. I used to judge myself as a mother for not giving enough and being enough. I was looking back too often, stuck in a cycle of being absent to the moment, and living in the past, regretting all I never did.

Now, I practice being present as often as I can. I see through eyes of gratitude as often as I can. Life is too short to not practice this and make it our aim. Life is to short to live only replaying the past and wishing things were different– we were different or better. All we can do when those feelings present themselves is to learn from them and not repeat the pattern. We can’t live there.

In another blink, Pheonyx will be a boy, no longer a baby. I will stop and pause one moment down the road only to realize years have flown on by. I will miss what has passed, but I choose to not sorrow over it. It is the reality of life. It moves forward and not backward. There is nothing we can do. It is the law of life.

All we can do is make the most of each moment of every day and live in line with that flow. Not looking back with regret, or forward in anxiety or even anticipation of what may come. We don’t need to drown out our moments by feeling them too much to bear, if, God forbid, our mind is still and we experience what it is to not worry and regret. This is not why we are here! Though it is a wide-spread, universal human habit to not be where we are in the moment.

We just need that invigorating and enlivening perspective of presence and utter gratitude, to stop thinking and to just be. To do nothing and to just let the moment speak to us and fill us with the meaning of what it is to be here and now, alive and human. It is not easy when we first begin, but as we practice it, it becomes a healthy habit.

Mindfulness, my friends. Savor your moments today! ❤

Much Love,

Tiffany