Resolutions

by Gina Catanzarite

Quite by accident, as I was doing research for a work project, I stumbled upon two quotes that set the tone for my 2016 New Year’s resolution.

Quote Number 1 is by Saleem Sharma:

“A thousand moments lost because you took them for granted, just because you expected a thousand more.”

Quote Number 2 is an excerpt from the book Belles on Their Toes by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey:

“In a person’s lifetime, there may be not more than a half a dozen occasions that he can look back to in the certain knowledge that right then, at that moment, there was room for nothing but happiness in his heart.”

At first, they may seem unrelated but the more I contemplated them, the more I saw that the first quote does connect very certainly to the second one.

I take so many moments for granted. We probably all do, so focused are we on engineering our futures. After all, that’s what New Year’s resolutions are about, right: Resolving to change, to correct the wrongs and live with greater intention. And we naturally expect that we will be granted “a thousand moments more” to accomplish these resolutions.

Humans are funny that way, assuming we have all the time in the world, assuming we have unlimited chances to make our lives happy and complete sometime in the future.

So how does this all relate to Quote Number 2? I realized that I spend a lot of time— far too much time – thinking about what I’ll do to make myself happier in the future. But this second quote startled me into examining my past for moments when “there was room for nothing but happiness in my heart.”

Some are momentous, obvious. . . like the moment a beaming Russian orphanage worker plunked two little babies into my arms and told me, in careful English, “Now you are a mama.”

But some sneak into your heart, extraordinary because they are so pure and unplanned and uncomplicated . . . like the time my friend and I sneaked away for a day at the beach and a bold seagull swooped down and stole an entire donut right out of her hand, just as she was about to bite into it.

And the spontaneous road trip with co-workers, when we belted out the John Denver song Country Roads while driving, hopelessly lost, through the hills of West Virginia.

There are probably more and they’d come to me if I gave it some thought. And that’s the problem: We don’t stop to appreciate the miraculous “little moments.” We live so quickly nowadays that moments flash by with all the staying power of a pithy tweet or Facebook status, forgotten as soon as the next post pops into the digital feed.

And so my resolution is this: I will stop expecting a thousand moments more. And in doing so, I will be present to appreciate the little moment I’m in. If I am paying attention, I may just realize that it has all the capacity to be miraculous and happy, too, if only I have the patience, and the gratitude, to name it.

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Gina Catanzarite, owner/operator of Arania Productions, and an award-winning television producer, author, media consultant and teacher who has worked both nationally and locally in her fields since 1987.

Gina is the instructor of Luminari’s Teen Writer! camps, being offered June 27 – 30, 2016, in Pittsburgh, PA.