Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Waiting to Die


I get tired of waiting: waiting for my daughters to complete their after school activities; waiting for dinner; waiting for work to be over; waiting for me to finally decide to exercise again.

It seems that all of life is a waiting game.  We wait for the next job, the next tv episode, the next meal, the next weekend.

The answer, of course, is to stop waiting and start being.  As I wait for my kids to finish their swimming lessons, I can be doing: I can be watching them and cheering them on, I can be writing my novel, I can be napping, I can be picking my nose.  Whatever it may be, I can most certainly be doing something other than waiting.

Before most of us know it, we will have waited our lives away instead of living for the here and now.  If we have to go to work, we need to be present at work; if we have to go shopping, we should be shopping, not pining for the next task, the next job, the next obligation.

Life is a series of obligations: life is getting through the day.  Life is just carrying on in spite of whether we like what we are doing or what is happening to us.

I keep reading about and am slowly internalizing the fact that the very simple secret to life is simply to stop waiting (because every minute we really ARE one minute closer to death, like it or not) and to start being present with what is happening.

Jesus says it, Eckhart Tolle tells, us, Buddha tells us, Oprah tells us, my mother tells me.  All the enlightened souls, one way or another, tell us to be where we are now and make our heaven our present moment.

Heaven or hell: apparently it's up to us.  And the more I live, the more I realize that heaven or hell is this very moment right now.  It's time to start living.

Tricky business, this living thing.  I'm going to try to make it more fun than I've been making it lately.  By accepting it.  I am where I am.  I am doing what I am doing.  I might rather be at a beach resort (that is actually happening in two weeks!), but right now I am at my desk in the dark, feeling guilty that I'm not watching my kids practice their strokes in the pool.  They're such little dolphins and this mommy doesn't go to see them do their thing often enough.  So I'm going to stop blogging about enlightenment and waiting and go watch those sweet girls do their thing.





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