Living in the Breaths of the Moment

A dance instructor once told my daughter that they knew they had found a gifted dancer by watching how they moved through the breaths in the music. You can teach steps and teach dancers to count, but not how to breath with the music. The same is true with life. It is what we do in the breaths of life that determines how we deal with life and the quality of our lives.

Do we allow life to rob us of our breath, to suck life from us and leave us an empty shell that has nothing left at the end of the day? In the ever maddening spiral of our fast paced world where work, church, friends, family demand more and more of our time, energy and resources, we feel we have to respond and rise to the demand. We carry the weight of the worry and care of the day, carefully adding the new burdens, cubby-holing them so that we can pull them back out to study and review. When do we breath? When do we stop and take a breath? We no longer remember how to live in the breath of the moment. If only we realized what we have lost.

My daughter-in-law sent me a picture of our young grandson. He was totally engrossed in a flower that he had just picked. Another picture showed him sitting and “reading” a book. At age 15 months he couldn’t decipher the letters on the page, but he was totally lost in the moment of the story that was unfolding in the pictures of the book. We loose sight of the simple pleasures and goals that we had when we were young and the ability to accept life as it happens and find pleasures in the moments as they occur.

I have rediscovered these same moments myself during the last seven months. During the flurry of the day I will find myself suddenly lost in the awe and wonder of something small, but wondrous. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had rediscovered the wonderment of childhood. That the simple beauty of a flower or the over-powering awe of a sudden vista that burst upon me as I rounded a corner in the road would bring me to a sudden stop. The world would hold for a few moments, my soul needed to be fed.

I found myself drinking in the beauty and peace like a poor soul coming in from the desert to an oasis spring after a long hard crossing. My parched soul soaked up the moments and at times hoarded the time and they have turned into hours as I wondered across the hills and valleys of the countryside. For the first time in years I can really breathe. I am not talking about the physical act of breathing, but the breath of the soul and being able to inhale and breathe in and savor the moment for it’s joy, what ever that moment might be.

I have become a believer and partaker of the philosophy that it is not the number of breathes that we take but the number of moments that take our breath away. May this day find you breathless from the wonders you discover as you stop to take in the moments of your life.