Epiphanies often strike during the most ordinary moments. Today, for example, I spent the morning with my girls, cleaning their very messy room. (We’re talking hurricane worthy here.) As a reward for all of our hard work, I took all of the kids shoe shopping. (Since it’s been a good month since we’ve had a decent snow storm, it didn’t seem fitting to make them keep wearing their winter boots.) Thus began our adventure into Retail-land. We live fifteen miles away from a town whose biggest accomplishment was the addition of a second stoplight fifteen years ago. As you can imagine, our choices are limited. We passed through the four or five viable options for retail shoe stores, found decent deals on adorable shoes, stopped along the way for milkshakes, and poured ourselves back into the car at about 6:30, exhausted. From the blissful silence of the backseat, I heard my oldest daughter: “This has been a really fun day, Mom. You know, usually, you’re stuck working on your computer all of the time. Today, you spent the whole day with us.”
She might as well have sucker-punched me, because I always thought she and her sister and brothers were too busy playing with each other whilst I immersed myself online or writing, to notice that I wasn’t with them. Silly me. Something as simple as an early spring shopping trip and milkshakes made my children feel like they had me all to themselves. I thought I had my priorities all figured out–I put my family first, above all else, right? Yeah, right. Not if you ask them. But theirs were not the mutterings of starving kids–if they need fed, I feed them nutritiously, nor were they the complaints of ill-dressed, ill-bathed rugrats–if they need baths or showers or decent clothing, I see to these needs too. What I am missing, and what my daughter spelled out clearly today, is that caring for my kids’ needs is not the same as meeting their emotional quotas.
They need more of my uncluttered, undistracted time. There’s so little time to begin with, isn’t there? But if I haven’t been filling it by addressing my top priority–my family–then what is it all for, really?
The take-away lesson here is not to tell you that I’ll be spending more time with my children and hanging up the laptop for the time being. That too would be foolish, because the computer is truly a writer’s lifeline. What I am going to do is rewrite my priority list and then I’m going to do a time log, logging all of my major activities during a forty-eight hour period. At the end of the forty-eight hours, I’m going to see how much time I spent doing the activities that I’ve said matter to me most. The results might be astounding, or they may be predictable, but the ‘test-time’ will give me a clear idea how much time I spend doing the things I most cherish. Obviously some habits need to change, but re-evaluating priorities lends habit-kicking focus. Try this exercise too and you’ll be well on your way to finding your best life. I know I can’t wait to get started.
Where Has The Time Gone? Blog 