Focus on Right Now

April 29, 2013 Off By Lisa

I am a very impatient person.

When I decide I want something done, I want it done yesterday. Or sooner. I think I’ve always been this way. There are so many things in my life that I can recall wishing would happen faster, end faster, take less time.

This morning I hollered at the microwave because the minute I punched in to heat my tea water took longer than a minute…or so it seemed. When I heard myself squawking at the microwave, I realized I was already knee-deep of a pattern of impatience lately with just about everything.

There are about ten projects, four items of necessity, three piles of paperwork, several big dreams for the future, and a feeble Gerbera daisy that I’m looking at with irritation and impatience right now. I want these things to start, end, change…and I want them all to fall into place right now.

But I turned to some words of wisdom from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tonight – words I know well, but needed to spend time with again. These lines are from his poem “Psalm of Life” – not nearly in its entirety, but the words that spoke sternly to me in my current haste.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

Longfellow’s words remind us that time is indeed fleeting. To mark too much of our time wondering, worrying, rushing, and looking for whatever is next on the horizon may just cause us to miss what we should be looking at right now.

And so, even though it is a difficult thing to do – especially right now – I will focus on the moments of my life that are immediately in front of me, not those for which I wish and wait.

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