May Twenty-Seventeen
Not the digits on the scale
Not the numbers in my salary
Not the speed at which I respond to a text message.
Not the square footage of my home
Not the circumference of my waist
Not the number of tasks I accomplish in a day.
Not the markings on my social calendar
Not the collection of awards on my wall
Not the volume of extracurricular duties I juggles all at once.
Instead
I’m keeping track of life.......
........I’m making the moments count…
In the kisses
In the hugs
In the words of my loves ones that ease my cluttered mind.
I’m finding joy in the now…
In the blessings
In the do-nothing moments
In the sacred pauses of life that heal my frenzied soul.
I’m keeping track of life
By cupping it in my two free hands
Because I don’t want to miss a childhood
A marriage
A friendship
Or the moments that make life worth living
I’m keeping track of life
Because now I see what’s important cannot be measured, purchased, or checked off a list.
It must be felt through the open hands and heart of an awakened soul.
-Rachel Macy Stafford Hands Free Life
My favorite part of my yoga class is when my teacher asks us to ‘set an intention’ at the beginning of class….At the end, she often asks us to check back in with that intention that we set at the beginning of class. I like that part; it means something to me. I have begun to incorporate this idea into other areas of my life. I try to set an intention before I run, work out, write, meet up with a friend, make a speech, eat a meal, discipline my children, state my opinion, or say yes or no to a request. The more I set intentions, the more I realize how many opportunities I have to do so in the span of a week, a day, or even an hour. I realize how often in the past I have not checked in with my intention or even made one to begin with. How easy it is to waste time, get off track, or miss the moment when I forget where my heart is? -Kristin Armstrong Mile Markers
Never in my life could I remember being so profoundly impacted by a single question than I was by this one written by psychotherapist and mom Andrea Nair: “How do my children feel about themselves as a result of spending time with me?”
Rachel Macy Stafford, Hands Free Life
“It’s rebellious, in a way, to choose joy, to choose to dance, to choose to love your life. It’s much easier and much more common to be miserable. But I choose to do what I can do to create hope, to celebrate life, and the act of celebrating connects me back to that life I love. We could just live our normal, day-to-day lives, saving all the good living up for someday, but I think today, just plain today, is worth it......
..... I think it’s our job, each of us, to live each day like it’s a special occasion, because we’ve been given a gift. We get to live in this beautiful world. When I live purposefully and well, when I dance instead of sitting it out, when I let myself laugh hard, when I wear my favorite shoes on a regular Tuesday, that regular Tuesday is better........
.....Right now, around our house, all the leaves are falling, and there’s no reason that they have to turn electric bright red before they fall, but they do, and I want to live like that. I want to say ‘What can I do today that brings more beauty, more energy, more hope?’.......
....Because it seems like that’s what God is saying to us, over and over. 'What can I do today to remind you again how good this life is? You think the color of the sky is good now, wait till sunset. You think oranges are good? Try a tangerine.’ He’s a crazy delightful mad scientist and keeps coming back from the lab with great, unbelievable new things, and it’s a gift. It’s a gift to be a part of it.......
.....I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing out loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now.....
.....I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that he gave life to someone who loves the gift......
What if, all at once, all the shabby, tired, used-up bodies and minds start to wriggle and pop, like they’ve been dropped into a deep-fryer, sizzling and dancing, transformed into motion? And something that has been deadened and distracted by the tension and noise of this world comes to life anew, wakes up and wiggles like a fritter in a frying pan, anointed, and taught to dance. Because we were made for motion, for arching up toward God with all the energy and passion of a thunderstorm, lightening slicing through a sleepy world to remind us that we serve a fast-dancing God, a God who set this world whirling and crashing through space so that we could live from our toes and drum out the pulse of a billion veins carrying lifeblood to a billion hearts, temples to a God that got his hands dirty making us from dust. Let’s sizzle and pop in his name. Let’s dance and shimmer and scrawl out our stories across the sky, like he taught us to. Let’s echo his words, and let our lives speak those words:
It is good.”
-Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
