Tag Archives: Life Lessons

Special Moments

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

How many special moments can we count in our lives? What deserves that honour?

Yesterday was my 21st wedding anniversary, surely that counts, as would my wedding day, and the birth of my wonderful children.

But what about that salted caramel ice cream I had last night with my family? What about my conversation with a colleague during a break in our meeting yesterday? What about the wave I got out of the driver’s side window when I let a car in ahead of me?

What about getting off my treadmill after giving myself a physical push with some interval training? Or listening to an insightful passage in an audio book? Or feeling my body relax during meditation?

What about a shared laugh at dinner? What about listening my my daughter recap her day? Or even sending a funny cartoon to a friend via text?

What about watching a sunset? Or petting my cat who pushes his nose against mine? Or a delicious meal?

A hug. A smile. A laugh. A quiet breath? A silent walk. A happy exchange with a store clerk. A supportive conversation with a friend?

We can reserve special moments for only sparse, special, and momentous occasions, or we can choose to celebrate a hundred or even a thousand special moments every day. These moments may not necessarily take our breath away, but they can be celebrated; a reason to smile; an impetus to value life; a moment to appreciate.

In this way, every day can be wonderful. How man special moments will you decide to have today?

Rewards for hard work

I’ve always said that the sport which correlates best with success in school is swimming. I think that when a kid regularly wakes up early and is on a pool deck at 5:30 or 6am, has to look at a board and see a tough workout that will take an hour to do, that builds a mental toughness that most other sports don’t provide.

I’m not saying a football or gymnastics workout can’t be equally as tough, but I am saying that no other sport routinely creates such a tough mental frame for a workout.

You arrive at swim practice and the workout is on the board. You know your warm up, your workout, your cool down. You know it will take an hour. You know it will be hard. You know that you can’t rely on others for anything other than to push you to work even harder. Now get in the pool.

After years of that, pushing yourself through the hoops that schools create are fairly simple. You understand hard work, you understand putting your head down and muscling through what needs to be done.

Forget for a moment that school isn’t just about that, and think about how valuable a skill that is. How useful it will be in the future?

Where in our lives do we train our bodies or our minds to push through and do something hard, for the payoff later? Because ‘work smarter, not harder’ is a wonderful quote, but it doesn’t build grit and perseverance. We don’t become mentally tough through short cuts. Diets don’t work without discipline. Strength doesn’t come without resistance. Effort can’t be sustained without practice. Patience isn’t built without delay of gratification.

Sometime hard work is the reward.

We love the rewards of our hardships but curse the hardships themselves. ~ Seneca

Interrupting a Pattern

Recently, traffic has been getting to me. I know this because I speak out loud to the other drivers, in my car, with my windows rolled up. No chance of them hearing me, thankfully because I’m not being kind.

I didn’t notice my uptake of nasty remarks, my daughter did. “Dad, what’s with you? Chill.”

This reminded me of an event that happened about 25 years ago. I was driving my girlfriend’s car, she was in the passenger seat, and there was construction ahead. I was in the right lane, which was closing, and the cars started to ‘zipper’ into one lane, a car from the other lane followed by a car in my lane, back and forth.

As I approached the end of my lane it became obvious that the driver that should have let me zip in front of him was not going to participate in the established pattern. He kept his front bumper less than an arm’s length from the back bumper of the car in front of him, moving quickly as the car in front moved.

‘What a jerk’, my girlfriend said. She might have used an expletive, and her tone was upset.

I let him ahead of me, not that I really had a choice. And a few feet further we came to a stop due to the construction. At this point, I saw his eyes in the rear view mirror. I waved, gave him a thumbs up with a huge smile, and I dramatically mouthed the words, ‘Thank you’!

He stared at me through the rear view mirror, I repeated: wave, smile, ‘Thank you’. A little further down the road, I saw him look again, I repeated. He rolled down his window and flipped up his middle finger angrily. We laughed, I repeated: wave, smile, ‘Thank you’.

We got through the the construction and as luck would have it, I caught up to him in the reopened right lane. I looked at him through my window, smiling and waving. He clearly said a profanity and gave me a passenger-side middle finger. He was literally steaming red, his face and neck completely flushed. We laughed.

Then he beeped his horn a couple times as he moved ahead and switched into the left turn lane, sticking his left hand out of the car window in a repeated middle finger gesture. I couldn’t hear him, but it looked like he was yelling, and I’m pretty sure what he was saying wasn’t polite.

We laughed, and laughed.

I’ll openly admit that killing him with kindness was not a kind thing to do. We were having a wonderful time, fully at his expense. But it was a valuable lesson for me about how our disposition towards an event can change our experience. My girlfriend and I had a wonderful time laughing at a traffic incident that usually caused us upset.

Now, I don’t want to go around causing others to be upset, but I do need to breath and rethink how I’m coping with traffic. Hopefully my family members won’t be needing to tell me to ‘chill’ again any time soon because I’m throwing nasty commentary towards other drivers.