This is Just a Moment; It's Not the Rest of Your Life

I was sitting on the bus this morning, reading O (Oprah) Magazine and saw this article/interview by actress Julianna Margulies (probably best known as Carol Hathaway in the ER TV series). She was talking about a particularly stressful event with her baby being up in the middle of the night, and the message really resonated with me:

"I worked myself into a complete state of anxiety about how I wasn't going to get enough sleep, how I was going to be late for work, how I'd be tired when I got there . . . all of which only made things worse. And just then, I heard my mother's voice in my head saying what she'd always told me: Honey, this is only a moment; it's not the rest of your life."

Here is the link to the entire article. For me, it can be easy to get overwhelmed with the "what ifs." Something will happen, and I'm immediately 6 steps ahead, usually not in a positive light, about what can happen from a given incident, which only exacerbates the panic about the situation at hand. But this reminded me that it doesn't have to be that way - sometimes it really is that moment in time. And we're all pretty resilient, aren't we? So what if the "worst case scenario" really happens. Most of us can bounce back from that and figure out what to do. Why waste time worrying about what hasn't even happened yet? Maybe if we put more attention into what is happening now and acting on it (rather than reacting to it), we can prevent those worst case scenarios in the first place. It's certainly not an easy practice. But I definitely want to start trying to live more in the moment and not worry about what has happened before, what will happen in the future, and what the current events say about either of them. Just live in the hear and now. Are you with me?