Brock Has My "Present"

We had a wonderful birthday party for Brock on Saturday and I am pretty sure I didn't peel my eyes off of him while he "ate" his splash cake, I didn't want to miss a lick!  I know Brock is my last baby and everything is just so tangibly LAST.  The last splash cake, the last single candle, the last birthday in this house... on to a new chapter.  But with each last there is a next, growth, progression and milestones to be met, and I'm thinking Brock knows that he just turned one!

Isn't that how it is though, they turn two and the horns grow or they turn one and start running when they were just crawling yesterday.  How do they know?  Does their new age vibrate them into the definition of being "1?"  I believe it does since in one day he seems to have grown-up over night!

It was a beautifully-hectic weekend of friends and family from out-of-town, but isn't that what birthdays, celebrations and parties are all about? Chaos!

Now we have moved onto the next chapter in our world...moving!  Now we are packing and preparing for our new house, new city, new schools, new dance studios and new streets to walk down.  Now we are thinking of paint and carpet and fences.  Now we are dreaming of light fixtures and play sets and where to put it all.  Now we are dreaming of "next."

I'm sure the dreaming of everything will be just as tasty as actually doing it all, since dreaming and imagining is free and I don't have to move off this couch to dream.  I'm sure that the idea of working-out in my new basement is much more perfect than actually putting on my sports bra.  I'm sure that the refrigerator in the new house is much smaller than what my brain has decided it will hold, but that is why life is about the journey and not the destination.

I know people that believe that "if they only do, get, have, go, are...." they will be happy.  The problem is that you have to be happy where you are first.  You have to be happy in the journey to where you want to be, to be happy when you get there.  I have to enjoy the packing, the dreaming, the planning, the painting, the enrolling and the saying "good-bye," to enjoy where I'm going.  Because as soon as I get there...I'm there.  Life is the journey.  Life is the planning.  Life is the first birthday, the decorating and the dishes and the laundry and the drive to work.  Life is the teething and your hair growing-out and losing the weight.  Life is cutting the grass and shaving your legs and burying your pet.  Life is the moments between the destinations, and the destinations themselves.

We believe that "if we only...were thin, fulfilled, rich, taller, had another baby, had everyone out of the house, had a better car, had a better job, had a bigger house..." everything would be better.  And it won't be, it will only be different.

I savored in Brock's splash cake, each lick, each taste, each bite, because it wasn't about him eating it or making a mess or enjoying it or hating it.  It was about all of it, it was about what he was doing and what he wasn't doing.  It was about him getting to one and being one and passing one.  It was about him sleeping and not sleeping and crying and teething and nursing and all of it and none of it.

If we stop believing that "THAT" will make us any happier than THIS is, we will understand that NOTHING can make us happy and that happiness is in us.  Happiness is a state of BEING, not a state of weight or family or friends or money or time or success or even health.  Happiness and joy and contentment is a feeling that comes from knowing that we are perfect right here and now, and that nothing has influence on that state, because our state of being is immovably within us.

The journey is life, everything in that journey is experience, what you feel during those experiences is growth and the growth you feel is your spirit expanding.  Feel the expansion of your spirt and the journey becomes the getting there, and there is where we are, when we are present.