I came
home tonight to 12C in the house and turned the heat on, crawled into a wool
sweater, sweat pants, and a cup of tea for breakthrough chills. I hit the
shower soon after that, and turned red like a lobster as I cooked myself in a
steam bath.
I’m almost
ready to put the electric blanket on my bed—if only I could remember where I
stored it last spring.
It’s the
24th day of August as I write this, and the crisp night air spills
out a pungent pre-autumn fragrance of wet, mulching leaves that I love but am
in no way ready for.
Talk to the hand. I have yet to finish unpacking my summer
clothes. There’s 16 spring projects and four summer time ones still waiting to
be checked off my to-do list and I haven’t yet planted my garden.
But
Mother Nature won’t disappoint. She’ll jack the temperature back up to 28C—but
only after I use up the rest of my propane blowing the damp cold out, and after
I find the electric blanket and have it tucked snugly on my bed and plugged in.
And oh,
yes, only after my fall/winter appetite kicks in and I lick the cookie dough
bowl clean and eat all the icing I made for the carrot cake.
Yet no matter where I’m at with my to-do list or where the outside
temperature sits, Thanksgiving decorations and Halloween witches on brooms already
are swinging from the ceiling in department stores.
The inevitable future is
relentlessly everywhere. No wonder so many of us lacks the ability to stay in
the present moment when so much out there influences us and convinces us to live
for anything but today.
When I think about what keeps me “here,” it’s children,
sailing, books, and a good one on one conversation with someone I care about.
Of particular interest to me are the little people around us who
live in the "now," like my grandson did when he was three years old.
As long as he could jump off the bottom step of the staircase,
then he could fly and everything was right in his world. Many grownups could take a lesson or two from that primary
school of thought.
Little children aren’t consumed by worries of what might
happen tomorrow, or next week, and they certainly don’t let the overloaded soul
get in the way of what’s right in front of them.
What they have in their hands, the little morsels of toast at
breakfast or the playdoh squeezing through the small holes on the top of the
hair mold are all that matter at the moment.
If they’re happy, the moment is lived in joy and there is
nothing else but that. If they’re angry or sad, the moment is lived thoroughly
with tears and screaming and then they leave it behind and move on to the next
now.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I too am
trying to learn something here. I do my best to pay attention to living in the
present moment, and to listen to my intuition when it whispers to me.
Now, if only that whisper would reveal where my electric
blanket is hiding.
