I remember a day when I could truly stay in a moment.
No aspirations for the future.
No regrets about the past.
Just truly be present in a moment.
That changed for me when we entered the world of assisted reproductive technology.
It is very difficult to be in the moment during an infertility cycle.
You have to be thinking about the next shot.
The next blood draw.
The next ultrasound.
The next two week wait.
Then if it doesn’t work, you think about what to do next.
I think it’s impossible to be in the moment all the time.
But it’s also not healthy to constantly be living for the future.
Or dreading the future.
Or dwelling on the past.
To this day I still tend to predict outcomes of future moments that never turn out to be as dramatic as I imagined they would be.
Most of the time the drama turns out to be all in my head.
Predicting what someone will say, how they’ll react, or what the outcome of some event will be…rather than just taking the moment as it comes…is exhausting.
Of course there are going to moments that suck.
But why practice the misery of thinking something is going to suck before it actually does?
I found that the best thing to do when I got into those ‘what I should have done differently’ or ‘what the hell do I do next’ is to close my eyes, and listen to my own breath.
Breathe in the present.
Breathe out the past and future.
Ahh. Much better.