Being present.  We hear about that quite a bit, right?

I talk about it all the time, certainly your social media feeds carry images of beautiful beaches begging us to tune in, and it is also a bit of buzz phrase these days, right?  Ironic, given the pace we move at in this world…

So today I’m going to share a short story of how a brief moment of BEING PRESENT changed my day….

Here goes…

So do you ever notice (or not!) how sometimes life feels like it is just passing us by?

We wake up, go to work, or get kids to school, eat at some point, clean up, and do most of it again the next day?

Now I’m not trying to make the routines of our life sound like a bad thing, because these routines do make up our lives, but I pose this question to you: do you ever notice what goes on during the space in between?

This morning I was zipping around the house, trying to get a variety of things done before my first client arrived, and as I opened the blinds in the bathroom window, I saw dozens of birds dive bombing our grapevine.

So I watched.

I actually got lost in it for a few moments.

I wondered where the heck they all came from.

And then a cardinal arrived… and in my family (and perhaps in same way yours too) this is a symbol of my late grandfather, Rodsie.  So seeing a cardinal always makes me smile.  And after a few moments the female cardinal appeared…  Gram, my grandmother who recently joined Rodsie in heaven.  I watched them fly around together, darting back and forth between the grapevine and the Rose of Sharon tree (they also had one in their yard) deep in activity.

This went on for at least five minutes.

I was smiling.  I was thinking about them and all the joy they brought to my life.  I felt them present.

This moment set, or should I say re-set, the tone for my day.

So what if I had just continued buzzing from one thing to the next and hadn’t paused to watch what was going on outside when I opened the blinds.  What if I hadn’t allowed myself to be present to what was going on around me?  What a moment I would have missed.

We must remember – and become present to – the moments “in between” the activities of our lives.  Those moments when seemingly nobody is watching.  Well, watch.  I’m sure glad I did, as you just never know what you might see.