present moment

Well, the school year has ended.  My son has completed his Sophomore year of high school.  Next week, he will cross another growth threshold.  He will get his drivers license.

I realized that it was too late.  I missed the last time.  Do you know that feeling?  That realization that you just passed a threshold, and did something for the last time?

What I have realized, time and again, is I pass those points and don’t even realize it until the moment has already passed.  It seems I didn’t even have a chance to savor it.  It passed, and I didn’t see it coming.

The threshold I am talking about, the last time, is not a big one.  Life seems to be made up of lots of little last times (and first times, too).  For many, it would mean little.  But I will miss it.

For the majority of my children’s school careers, I have had the pleasure of taking them to school.  I got to spend a few minutes in the car on the way to school, and got to see them off to the start of their day.

This past year, my daughter left for college.  So after a year of being off the school drop-off duty, I was back on this year.  Just my son and me, and since we live close to school, not even a long trip.

My daughter returned from college, and for the last few days of the school year, I took him to school, then delivered her to her summer job.

That’s when I realized:  my last time to take him to school, just him and me, had passed.  No celebration, no fanfare — he probably didn’t even notice it.  But I did.  Yet another point that I realize that life is shifting and changing.  Next year, he will drive himself.  One more place where a parent moves into obsolescence.

This is not to say that the change is a bad thing.  My son is growing up.  He is branching into the world.  But that is still a loss for me.

So what, you might wonder, does this have to do with someone working to save your marriage?

Sometimes, life races by.  We get desperate to do something out there, in the future.  And in the desperation to get somewhere, we miss where we are.  We lose the daily moments that make life wonderful.

Work on saving your marriage, but remember to savor the moment.  Focus on where you are and what you are doing.  We never know when we are doing something for the last time.  So we can either savor the moment or regret the moments we missed.

A single focus can be a very dangerous thing.  And nothing is more representative of that than trying to save a marriage.  It can feel so overwhelming and can occupy all of your thoughts, if you let it.

But there is more to life than any single element.  Even your marriage.

One of my clients for years was abandoned and left by her husband almost 30 years ago.  She spent the next few years in a depressed and alcohol-numbed trance.  Her three children grew up during those days.  And she missed many of those last times (and first times, and lots of other time) tied to a crisis that had passed, but kept her captive.

In the end, she gave up the majority of her life for the grief of a single event.  She spent years trying to find a way to win him back, then spent years regretting what she should have done to keep him, then spent years loathing the person she became.

That process robbed her of a life.  More accurately, she robbed herself of a life.  She tied herself to a single event, and reduced herself to that one point in her life.  The promise of more for herself and her children was destroyed by actions of which she had no control, then choices that were hers to control.

Realizing it or not, she made choices to stay connected to an event, a hurt.  She could never let it go.

Strangely, we humans go in two different directions.  Sometimes, we act as if this is all just a dress rehearsal.  We act as if we are preparing to get started, and in the meantime, we lose out on living.  Others act as if some single event makes or breaks our life.  We get so focused on that one event, we lose out on living.

Life is made up of savoring the moments, whatever they are, as they come.  We never know when they will be the last.