This

I wrote this today after reading an Instagram post from a friend who lost her mother suddenly one month ago after a string of deaths over the past 4 years including her father, brother, uncle and ex-boyfriend who committed suicide early last year.

Reading her post about grief and having multiple conversations with clients about boundaries with work-life balance for both them and me this is what I am left with.

No answers. No shame. No blame. Just questions for us all but mostly for me.

THIS

Life so precious.
So light. 
So fragile. 
So raging.

Life feels like a surge a lot of the times;
Like a violent sea that eases over us becoming a peaceful calm.

We never know when the flame that flickers will go out. 
It can burn brightly for decades to come or go out suddenly like a violent wind blew through it.

Which will it be?
We don’t know.
We can never know.
As much as we think we want to we definitely do not.

All we have is today.
All we have is this moment.

How will you spend it?

Shall we run from place to place with a heartbeat pumping as if we were running through burning buildings?

Shall we respond to emails/texts from work during dinner, the movie, bedtime? With notifications going off in the middle of the night like fire alarms?

Missing out on each moment throwing them away like junk mail?

What about the sunrise?
The sunset?
The smile on the stranger’s face who passes you on the slippery winter’s path?
Or the baby cooing?

Lost moments all of them.

It’s the simple pleasures we miss. It’s the moments that mean the most that are lost.

How do we shift the force of the tide?

One moment at a time.
One breath at a time.

We may not be able to change this toxic societal shift but we can, in this moment, pause and be in awe of this gift we have been given; life.

This breath.
This heartbeat. 
This brilliant sky.

This. This is what we have.
And it is amazing.

Stephanie Troy, LICSW is a Mind/Body Therapist & Trainer specializing in stress and anxiety management.  She is the owner of Your Whole Healing which provides individual counseling in Harvard Square as well as corporate wellness stress management programming focusing on helping individuals Strive to Thrive.  

Stephanie came to this specialization in holistic health and stress management through healing herself from burnout in the field of social work. Over a cup of tea, Stephanie shares with her clients' antidotes she has learned along the way combined with professional guidance on better managing stress and burnout. She writes both for her own blog as well as a contributor to the Huff Post and Elephant Journal.