This morning I sat down to write an article for a client on seizing every moment and knowing how to recognize the important moments that define us. Here’s the thing… when we are in the moment we don’t always know how important it actually is.
Sure there are those moments that are obvious: weddings, funerals, births, graduations…. you get the idea.
The assignment made me pause and think through some of the ways these last eight weeks have been defining.
More time for art
This weekend we celebrated Mother’s Day. My kids went all out. They created a menu, decorated the dining room, prepared breakfast, and stayed up well past midnight preparing.
The next morning when I woke up around 7:30 and walked out to get my coffee I noticed the banner and the streamers, turned around, crawled back into bed, turned on my audiobook, and patiently waited. At 10:30 I woke my husband up and asked him to please go wake up the kids I really wanted coffee.
Later that day, as the five of us crowded around the dining room table painting llamas my husband picked up from Painting with a Twist I knew this was one of those moments I would always cherish. My middle child picked up the feeling and announced, “You know if it weren’t for Ms. Rona (her pet name for COVID-19) today wouldn’t have been this awesome.”
She’s right.
I want to create more family memories like this one. I want to gather around the table, not just for meals but also for massive art projects. I’m busy decorating my art room and stocking up on all the acrylic paint I can find. No surface is safe. We’ve painted shells, rocks, canvases, bricks, and now are working on a Jenga set.
This time at home also inspired me to finish a few projects I had started and put off for various reasons. One of them being a Therapeutic Art Life Coach Certification.
More time to talk
This time of “stay at home” has provided us with the opportunity to have deep and meaningful conversations. It’s given us the chance to listen, to be bored together, to plan together, to play together, and to just be together. Something that hasn’t always been a reality in our life as a military family.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d much prefer Ms. Rona wasn’t hanging out in our communities. I’d also rather live in a world where deployments didn’t take our loved ones away, where war didn’t happen, and cancer already had a cure. But the hardest times often become the ones that define who we are as individuals. They are the moments that define us.
More time to give of ourselves
The question we each have to ask is how is it defining “me.” How is this season pulling out the qualities in yourself that you both love and hate? Are you willing to give up a little of your own comforts for the safety of others?
Bryant Golden, the lead pastor at Centerpoint Church, calls this Chasing Daylight.
We are each given 86,400 seconds in a day. The question we have to ask ourselves is how will we spend those moments? They are use or lose and must be spent on yourself or others, period. There aren’t any other options. How will you spend your 86,400?
I’ve been awestruck at the number of people who have stepped up during these times to serve others. More people are fostering pets, men and women are pulling out their sewing machines and giving of their time and resources to sew masks for medical workers, and we are all handing out a little more grace to co-workers and friends who are navigating through new normals.
What have you been doing to cope? We’ve turned to art, binge-watching the Office, massive amounts of audiobooks, long conversations into the night with each other, fostering kittens, finishing projects that have been left undone, and finding ways to bless our neighbors.
*Title photo by Igor Kasalovic on Unsplash
