“Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years, but of moments. You must experience each one before you can appreciate it.”
~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
For the past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about moments. For me, June has always been a month to get through so that I could enjoy July. I’ve always been a planner. When I was teaching, I had a big calendar on the wall of my classroom and each day I’d mark a big black ‘x’ through the days, counting down until the next break. I had a countdown to summer stuck up in my locker all through high school.Some of the wonder of shifting my life into a place of magic is that I have stopped doing so many countdowns and started enjoying more moments.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I watched that glorious video of Courtney Hadwin, the little girl who wowed the judges on America’s Got Talent. (If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it.) As we watched her face at the end, we wondered about her life from that moment on and wished for her that this would be just the beginning of a lifetime of magical moments.
Interestingly on the same day I saw Courtney, I was sent a video of Dorothy Williams having the same moment on the same stage. (If you haven’t seen it, watch it to the end!) In the interview at the beginning she tells Nick Cannon that even though she’d been on stage all of her life, she’d never been the star, so she was showing up to try to have her moment. In sharing that with him and by showing up, Dorothy got to be a star.
Once my tears had dried, both of these videos made me think a lot. What moment do I need? When I am 90 years old and looking back on my life, what moment will I wish I had had? What wonderful, golden, precious, glorious thing do I most want to happen? And how can I make it happen in the best and most magical way?
I think that if you ask yourself this one question, you will learn more about yourself than you will using many self-help books and courses: What moment do I need in my life?
You may have an answer to this question come right away, or you might need to ponder it a bit, but either way, listen. Listen to the whisperings of your soul. It might be something that you think could never happen. Make it happen anyway. Be inspired by Dorothy: what do you need? Boil it down to the essential ingredients and start to invite it in. Moments are precious, and often they are surprising and magical, but they still need your participation. You have to be out there. You have to show up.
What moment would you like to have in your life? How can you begin to make that happen?
xo
Last week when we were up in our new house, talking to the builder, I looked up and realized that we had built a treehouse. Our house isn’t IN a tree (In Costa Rica, that would be crazy!), but where it sits is level with the treetops in all directions. I even got a delighted text from my husband yesterday telling me that he was at the same level as some visiting monkeys.
