learning to be present

It has been my recent practice to learn to be more present in my life. For some people presence is disturbed by their past - for me its mostly future. My mind is generally several steps ahead of reality. This causes me to lose the moment. And so I have been very consciously trying to stay in the moment.
To enjoy the moment.
To be the moment.
Our lives are made up of moments.
Even those moments that we consider in between the moments of our lives.
They are all moments.

We, my family, have been given an opportunity to learn how to be in the moment. This can be done simply by changing the moment so often and in such varied, unforeseen ways that planning is simply not possible. That being present is your only choice.
It's kinda like taking a summer course - the learning has been consolidated into a very short and demanding amount of time.
In this case, one month.

I stopped blogging at that point, one month ago, and I shouldn't have. Blogging is my diary, my journal and often my memory.
So now, for me... I blog.

In late July my giddy wife and I made plans to visit Ptown for a couple days to celebrate our 25th anniversary. The timing ended up being not very good - tho we didn't know that when we made our reservations back in the winter.

My mother, as I have mentioned only once or twice here, has been dealing with cancer since March of last year. This past winter, after chemo and radiation, she was dubbed in remission - tho pain and other symptoms continued to bother her. She persisted in going to doctors for tests and procedures whose outcomes proved nothing. She was getting frustrated.

By the time we were packing our bags (not too many bags, it was a short trip...but hey... it was Ptown, so I of course would need several pairs of shoes ... none of them being sneakers...but that is a story for another time) my mothers pain level had escalated to a point where they were going to finally look inside. She had had a scan which showed "something" and they would now do a laproscopic biopsy to look inside.

Just before we left, my mother assured us she would be fine and to go and have a good time. In fact, she drove herself to get pre-procedure blood work that afternoon.
That was July 24th.

Her results were not good. All the previous scans and blood work somehow hid the truth.
We came home a day early and went to pick her up at the hospital. She was sore, but walked to car, got in and we whisked her home.
That was July 28th.

Today is August 31st.
My mother is wheelchair bound, cannot figure out how to dial her own phone, she cannot bathe or bathroom herself... and asked me yesterday why there was no food service at this place (her home).

It's been a month.

We have been present everyday.