The Now
Like a lot of us I can get caught up in tomorrow. Whatever worries or excitements it holds is what my mind grabs onto. One of my most common areas to do this with is with my kids. My kids are 12 and 10 but I already see so much of their “tomorrows”. How will high school treat them? Will they get to do what they want to do in such a big school district? What does their life look like after high school?
They are 12 and 10 and yet I can already picture them as 18 and 16. I get caught in seeing them as who they will be and sometimes miss who they are. In that aspect, last night was a blessing.
We are on a trip and so our normal routines are thrown off. We tend to get really busy on trips (and let’s face it in real life) so we took an afternoon just to sit and relax. There were naps, reading, writing, etc. In the evening we made tacos. While we ate we turned on a movie I hadn’t seen but my kids had, Kung Fu Panda.
My son started watching with me but he claimed “he’d probably stop watching at some point”. An hour later I snapped out of my focus on the movies and realized something. He was sitting right next to me, glued to the computer screen we were watching. My wife and daughter were no where to be found. I walked around the apartment and found them in a room, talking and doing their nails while watching a movie of their own.
In that moment it struck me that my kiddos are just that, a 12 year old with a goofy sense of humor and a 10 year old that loves doing girly things and talking to her momma.
As I sat back down on the couch to restart the movie I felt a tremendous sense of peace not in looking at what they would do, but in looking at who they were. I was content in the present rather than anxious about the future. Sometimes I forget what contentment in this moment feels like because I spend so much time with my mind racing to the future.
To paraphrase Jesus in Matthew 6: Don’t worry about tomorrow. It’ll get here soon enough. Be diligent and make your plans but let your mind focus on today because once it’s gone you’ll never get it back.