Do you ever find yourself amazed at how quickly the days can pass one minute, and how long the days can be the next?

I can’t believe it’s Friday already, yet it’s the first chance I’ve had to add a post here. Life has an uncanny way of intruding on my plans… even with my so-called ‘active parenting’ years behind me!

As I look back on the week, trying to figure what the heck I’ve been up to that’s caused me to neglect posting, I can see that the above statement isn’t exactly true. There were other ‘chances’ — I simply chose something else.

And isn’t that how it always works? No matter what we claim… we are always choosing to attend to the thing we’re attending to in any given moment. Nobody is ‘making’ us choose something else. I mean, when it comes right down to it… even if someone has a gun to our heads, we’ll choose to do what they tell us to do rather than face the imagined consequences of getting shot.

So doesn’t it make sense to start appreciating our power to choose at all times and making that appreciation more important than bemoaning the fact we didn’t get everything done on our list?

I’m the editor of a monthly magazine. That means I have a ‘deadline’ at the end of each and every month. Often work gets backed up for me during the last week of the month. So of course, since the first half of this week was the last few days of last month… I know what was keeping me from my blog on those days. And I choose to keep plugging away on the articles because meeting that end of month deadline was more important to me than posting on my blog.

Yesterday was the first… deadline was met and while there are always a few dangling details to work on in wrapping up an issue, I could have made time for my blog. Instead… I received an unexpected invitation to a picnic lunch at the beach with my grandson.

Let’s see… cleaning up details or posting to my blog or taking a couple of hours to play. Yes… time with the grandson wins that round!

After a couple of hours I returned home only to have trouble with my computer. Here is where I let myself get a bit lost. Instead of truly taking the time to get in touch with what I most felt like doing, I wrestled with the computer for several hours!

Understand… the wacky computer didn’t ‘waste my time’… my choosing to tackle ‘gettingittoworkthewayIwantedittoworkrightnowdamnit…’ when I was feeling frustrated is what ‘wasted’ my time. I almost caught myself thinking there was no other choice… yet there were many, many other things I could have chosen to do.

Let this be a reminder the next time you’re tempted to blame your child as the reason you don’t find all the things on your ‘to-do’ list done!