Slow down, you really are doing fine.

Life looks a little different lately and I think the more I step into a new year and look back on the past year, there’s a lot of things I missed - bright sunsets falling behind the marsh, good conversations because I left the party too early, moments that I sat on the beach and didn’t just appreciate listening to the waves crash on shore. There are so many moments I wish I could go back and relive again, and regrettably, I recognize there were too many moments I spent wishing time would move faster…but something happened recently that has reminded me to slow down.

Despite all that I’ve been through and am still going through, I’ve just learned to just be present. When I think about it, it’s actually pretty funny. My mom has this nickname in my family, we call her the road runner, and that’s just because she’s constantly on the go. My uncle usually laughs and says “there goes beep beep.” I tell this story because I’m really nothing like my mom, in that sense at least. I’m patient, laid-back, and less likely to be doing 1,000,000 things at once. But I realize now there were a lot of difficult moments in the past year that I tried to race through; and instead of wishing time would slow down, I wanted it to speed up. It’s only two weeks into the new year and something happened that reminded me - we are never too busy to do the things that are important; to make time for the people we love and the things that make us happy. I always preach that I don’t know what tomorrow brings, hell I don’t even know if there will be a tomorrow, so, shouldn’t that be more of a reason to take every moment for what it’s worth and appreciate what we have while we have it? I always told myself I would never be someone who took the little things for granted and I vow to do more of that this year. To take those little moments, those mundane conversations, those glances across the room, those orange and blue sunsets in my backyard, and I'm going to bottle them up because one day those little moments may be the only thing we have to look back on.

I read some research recently that said our ability to be resilient is directly aligned with the amount of time we spend recovering, in other words, slow down, rest… because without it, we miss out on all this life we have left to live.

Once she stopped rushing through life, she was amazed at how much more life she had time for.