To Blog or Not to Blog

It’s my turn to blog again – lions and tigers and bears, oh my! What to write about? You would think as a “writer” pithy words would flow from my mind to my fingers and onto the computer screen effortlessly.

Sometimes that actually does happen, sometimes not so much. So…this blog is not going to be about writing, it’s just going to be.

I’ve decided like Nina that I need to “get off the treadmill” of my own making and not stress unless absolutely necessary. What a novel concept, especially for women, right? If it’s not in my circle of influence, it’s not my problem. I don’t need to fix everything or save the world every day – I just need to find balance, and focus on the things that make me feel good deep in my soul.

I also need to turn my mind off, or at least tell it to shut up for a while, so my heart can push me forward to where I need to go. I’m a thinker – 24/7 – and my mind needs to go on vacation so my heart (or my instincts depending on what you believe) can run the show for a while. Intuition is a powerful tool and right now it’s telling me to share some of my favorite quotes with you and call it a blog, so I can get back to some much needed soul-searching. LOL!

In all seriousness, I hope you enjoy the quotes and are doing what you need to do right now to find balance in your life. Your soul will thank you.

1. Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success - Swami Sivananda
2. True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly - Jason Jordan
3. Don't be discouraged. It's often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock - Author Unknown
4. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams - Eleanor Roosevelt
5. Just when the caterpiller thought the world was over, it became a butterfly - Proverb
6. When you are going through hell, keep going - Sir Winston Churchill
7. Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand - Unknown
8. Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like it's heaven on earth - Mark Twain
9. It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary - Paulo Coelho
10. May the force be with you - Star Wars

Kodak Moments

Spring in New England doesn't creep up on you.  It arrives with a bang.  One day it is fifty degrees and frigid and the next it is in the eighties and sweltering.  If you blink, you can miss it. And I often do.  Busy with work, carpooling my kids, writing or painting, I glance up and the flowers are suddenly in full bloom, our brown world is a vibrant green, and I have no clue as to when it happened.  It is little wonder where the expression 'take time to smell the flowers' came from.  It came from our treadmill lives and our inability to stop to appreciate these moments of beauty whether in nature or in our own lives.

My kids are older.  My son a week away from his fifteenth birthday and my daughter coming up on her thirteenth in June.  Over night, they grew up on me.  They are more independent and their friends have replaced me as the nucleus of their world.

I've recaptured my life, becoming involved in my own activities and projects, but I find myself struggling to bridge that gap between being there for my kids and coveting my own time.  I will be typing away on my latest WIP, and my daughter wants to share her latest melodrama with me and we both get annoyed. My daughter will then do something so twelve and so sweet that it reminds me that these moments are precious, and I need to stop what I'm doing and savior them.  I'm talking about those Kodak moments.  When you see your child's first smile, hear their first words, or when they pedal off solo on a two-wheeler.

Being older, my kids moments are more subtle now and sometimes harder to appreciate. Pre-teens and teenagers should wear 'approach with caution labels'.  The first time my daughter addressed me with her hand on her hip and that grating tone of attitude, it caught me off guard.  My son stares at me and my husband with this blank look on his face while we are discussing his not too stellar Spanish participation grade.  My husband said we've become the parents in Peanuts.  We speak and my son hears that incomprehensible monotone in the background 'wawowwo...'.  These are the Kodak moments you delete.

But there are so many others, and I find myself having to watch for them for fear of losing them.  Like when I walk to the car and my daughter skips to it.  That is so twelve.  Or when she dances around the kitchen showing me the new steps she learned in her hip hop class.  Or when I walk into her room and on one closet door she has a picture of the latest teen heart throb but on the other, she has posters of puppies.  It illustrates that poignant pre-teen bridge between childhood and puberty, reminding me that she is hovering between the two.  I am so not ready for her to cross over.

Of course, moments with a teen-age son can be bitter sweet as well as funny.  Like when he advises me that I am no longer allowed to cheer him on at his baseball games unless the other mothers are cheering and to please not get out of my car in the school pick-up line and bellow his name (like I bellow -- it was a soft yell.  Really.)  Then there are those special moments when I'm trying to write a love scene for my WIP, and he interrupts his social studies homework to share with me the pertinent fact that ancient Chinese scholars grew their nails two inches long to show that they don't do manual labor.  Or he breaks into a perfect imitation of Stewie from Family Guy to ask me how my novel is coming.  Kind of kills the romantic mood, but it does make me laugh.

Yes, I want to finish my book, or my painting, or go out for a martini with the Quirky Ladies, but I don't want to lose these moments.  I want to take the time to smell the flowers before they are all grown and it's too late.  In doing so, I might find a wealth of lovely details to incorporate in my WIP....  After all, a good writer is a good observer.

As Ferris Bueller says, 'Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.'  Sad, but true.