Live in the Now

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans....


My dad had a heart attack on Monday.  A big one.  If he wasn't in fairly good shape, it more than likely would have been fatal.  It happened when he was playing tennis, which is his favourite thing to do.   Thankfully my Mom got him to the hospital and they quickly realized what was happening and shipped him off to the cardiac unit at St. Mary's in Kitchener.

He is doing better but he's not 100% out of the woods just yet.   To say that this was a shock would be an understatement.

When something like this happens, it gives you pause.  It's sad that it takes a traumatic event to make people stop and take stock of their lives.  We've become so "busy" that we go through our lives in a blur not really stopping to appreciate who and what we have.  I have been 100% guilty of this.

A few weeks ago my friend Sarah published this blog post that summed up a lot of what I had been feeling over the last year.   I feel like I've been going a mile a minute.  This year has flown by without me really noticing the passage of time.  All of a sudden Christmas is just over a month away and I'm left wondering where the time went.

All of this reinforces the decision I made at the beginning of October.  It's time for me to slow things down and live more deliberately.   I need to live life at my pace and find work that is fulfilling and in alignment with what matters to me.   No more racing from deadline to deadline.  Our time here isn't infinite, so lets make the best of it.

I'm making a conscious decision to live in the now in my day to day life outside of my physical activities.  When I'm running or cycling or swimming, I am able to just "be".  I am able to focus on the here and now.  Moving my body helps to ground my brain.  It quiets the noise.  The "chatter of planning" that takes place in my brain when I'm not moving.   That chatter makes it very hard to appreciate what is going on in that very moment in my life.  It's time to dull the noise and to make sure I take the time to really appreciate the people and the things that make up my life.   It's easy for us to unintentionally take people for granted, like our parents or our spouses.  My dad was always invincible in my eyes.  I could never imagine him NOT being there.   But life is life and death is part of life.  It's not something we like to think of or face so we brush it aside until it brushes back.

I don't want to miss out on the value of the moments that life gives me because I'll probably never get a second chance at any of them.

Live intentionally, friends.

xo

All You Need Is Love

Wiser words were never spoken (or sung in this case).  Love IS all we need to live a happy and fulfilling life.  What I'd like to know is WHY do we (and when I say we, I mean us women) have such a hard time giving ourselves the love we deserve?  We have no problem when it comes to loving our kids, our spouse our friends and our families.  But when it comes to ourselves we become our own worst critics. 

I started thinking about this last night as I got into the shower after my run.  I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and immediately focused on my belly.  I have a small pot belly.  Sometimes it's nice and flat (like once a month), sometimes (more often than not) there's a bump that turns into a roll that sticks out over the top of my shorts or pants.  I immediately grabbed it and thought "ugh, so gross".  But then I stopped myself.  I had read Lauren Fleshman's blog about keeping it real earlier that day and I thought "You know what...who cares if I have a pot belly?"  It is what it is.  Lauren has a point.  We put too much focus on trying fit into societies definition of "perfect".   We lose sight of what our bodies are actually capable of doing as women (like giving birth-whoa!)  We are fighting a losing battle when we do this.  We will never be happy.   So I asked myself:  Does it affect what my body is able to do?  No.  Do people that know me care that I have a bumpy belly?  No.  Does G love me any less because of this?  No. 

So why should I care? 

I shouldn't.  What I should do is show myself the same love that I show others.   Unconditional love.

I am perfectly imperfect and I have made the decision to LOVE that, pot belly and all.

 Happy Valentine's Day!