The Moment

It is not the past nor the future that prevents me from living in the moment. It is the moment itself which I flee.

I am listening to Dido's new album while my daughter is drawing at the park. This will may be the last weekend until April where we are at the park drawing as winter is about set in. In five months she won't be the same five year old she is now and these moments of her drawing may be gone. But I'm not thinking about that. I'm trying just to focus on the lyrics of the songs, a stanza of which really struck me this morning. "I can walk, with no end, nothing hurts, nothings pain. Nothings missed, no ones gone, moved away, nothings wrong."

But I am having a hard time staying in the moment. My brain is taking me to the next activity and fleeing this one. When my daughter is done I am pushing to go home but she wants to play some more which only makes sense since we really only just got to the park. So I pivot and say let's go find a duck and we head to the small lake inside the park. As we get close we don't see any ducks so I say in a playful tone "duck, duck, duck, where are you?" and my daughter riding my shoulders cheerfully sings back "duck, duck, is not here. duck, duck is not here". We keep walking, repeating and playing on the lyrics of our new song as we go. I am almost in the moment, but not quite. I am still thinking about what to do next. Just when we are about done walking around the lake we see a duck along the shoreline. It is a proud duck and my daughter climbs down onto the fake rock shore to get a closer look. I say "duck, duck, do you want to come over for dinner? We are having duck" to which my daughter laughs and says "babi, not nice". We are both happy and once again I'm almost lost in the moment. Except, I'm not. I'm already thinking about how to get out of the park and home.

It is then it dawns on me that I spend my life fleeing the moment. That the past, nor the future is my problem. My problem is the now.