This morning, while I was working, A Cup of Jo‘s newsletter popped up in my inbox and sent me on to read My son, the zebra.

I find this passage all kinds of moving, and a little bit haunting:

“…Sometimes there truly is no light at the end of the tunnel, nor will there ever be. The lesson that my zebra has taught me is that if it’s only going to get worse from here, then the best moment of our lives is now.

When I am lying with him in the hospital bed, I do everything I can to be with him completely. I feel his heartbeat, and I watch the particles in the air move when he breathes. When I do this, the tunnel vanishes all together and we become immensely alive, for this moment and not any other.”

This gives me goose bumps. It’s especially haunting because I really do think this is what it’s all about. Being still and present in the small moments that make up life. To do that I think you have to be crystal clear about what is actually important to you in your life, so you know to savour it when it floats by.

This (also from CoJ this week) was equally jarring somehow:

“When I am feeling dreary, annoyed and generally unimpressed by life, I imagine what it would be like to come back to this world for just a day after having been dead. I imagine how sentimental I would feel about the very things I once found stupid, hateful or mundane. Oh, there’s a light switch! I haven’t seen a light switch in so long! I didn’t realize how much I missed light switches! Oh! Oh! And look – the stairs up to our front porch are still completely cracked! Hello cracks! Let me get a good look at you. And there’s my neighbor, standing there, fantastically alive, just the same, still punctuating her sentences with you know what I’m saying? Why did that bother me? It’s so… endearing.”

It’s so easy to rush through our days (I’m always rushing!) in pursuit of things that aren’t actually the important things in life, and in doing so, actually completely miss the things that are… the important things in life.