Moments

I have had the most interesting string of rotten luck lately. It’s difficult and lengthy to describe, so I won’t, but it has got me thinking about moments.

It sounds cliché, but life is full of moments. Good moments, bad moments, mundane moments and exciting moments. I sometimes think that life is comprised of events, but that’s not true. Events are the more important moments; but just like moments, they tend to pass fairly quickly.

I look at my daughter, she will be two this month. Our lives with her have been comprised of moment after moment, and I wonder how the heck she’s already two – but all the moments have led up to the moment when, later on this month, she will cross the threshold and enter her third year of life. One moment she will be one, and then she will be two. There is no in-between. Even if you break it down and say that she is one-year, 364 days, 23hrs and 59 seconds…that is still only a moment, only a flash, and then it’s gone.

And she’s older.

Somehow, while I was busy changing diapers, playing silly games and hugging her relentlessly, the infant slipped away into a baby, my baby slipped away into a toddler, and my toddler is waving her chubby hand bye-bye as she slips away into a little girl.

It can be quite devastating when you step back and look at the entirety of the situation. How quickly it all passes.

And it’s wonderful too. It’s devastatingly wonderful.

It’s like when someone hits your car. There is no in-between moment. One moment you are minding your own business, the next moment your world is slightly altered. There is no in-between, no catching your breath to figure out how you’re going to respond, no preparation, nothing. Someone says something they didn’t mean. The word doesn’t come back and the course of life is altered for a different conversation. A moment is small but can have a profound impact on what you ultimately end up doing.  A gun goes off and there is the moment before, and the moment after and in the brief nanosecond that the event is happening, life changes, but you can’t really prepare. You react.

That’s how I feel like my life has been lately. Very little in the way of preparation, quite a bit of reacting to situation, after situation , after situation. And in the reacting, precious moments are slipping away with my kids and family.

These moments will all lead to a rather fantastic event of me graduating with an MBA. But the sacrifice is some of the moments devoted to my degree won’t go to watching my children grow, won’t go to sitting back and enjoying the evening with my husband, won’t be banked towards sleep or reading or laughing. We all balance moments for events. Time for rewards. It’s days like this that I sincerely hope it will all be worth it.