Don't Blink - Repost...

I guess my link yesterday didn't work - here is a repost. I love it - it's my favourite and it totally captures how I felt yesterday... how I feel lots of days actually......

Hubby is curled on the couch, watching a hockey game – our beloved Calgary Flames battle on the ice –pretty ordinary background noise in our home.


Wait? Lanny MacDonald? Mike Vernon? Joe Nieuwendyk???

Something is very strange here…..

Thanks to Retro Sports Central – the playoff series from 1989 is on – this is the year The Flames won the cup. I had to stop and watch.

I was eight going on nine when that game originally aired. Twenty two years have passed.

I can see my family watching that series, in a house empty compared to today, with brown overstuffed furniture, complete with a foot stool because no one used the word ottoman back then. The T.V. sat on shag carpet in a cabinet; the “remote” was attached to a box with a long cord that stretched across the living room. My mom was 34 (three years older than I am now), My Dad was 42 (five years older than hubby is today). My grandma was alive and well, we often hung out at her place which was just a block over – she cooked Sunday supper every week, we had Halloween parties and big Christmas Eve celebrations, we camped in an orange canvas tent, we had friends and family over to roast a pig in the ground, we went to the stampede, at Christmas we took a trip into the city to check out all the sparkly lights (Dad always knew where the best ones were), and grocery shopping was a BIG event we got to eat out and I got to walk around Towerlane Mall with Dad while my sister helped Mom shop. I remember when The Flames won the cup, I can still hear Dad’s shouts of joy as he leapt off his chair!

I was overcome with sadness as I watched that game a few days ago, I am overcome now. I had to leave the room then. I had to walk away from the computer today.

Don’t blink, twenty two years goes faster than you think.

My soul knows that twenty two years from now, if I am blessed to still be here I will feel the same about today. I know we can’t let the passage of time rob us of today, but still sometimes…….

I have a photo of my grandparents, they are young – twenties, thirties maybe. I often wonder if they had known then, what lied before them - the heartache, the end of their days not turning out picture perfect would they have done it the same? Would any of us?? The truth is if we missed the pain, we would miss the joy and thank God there is always a lot of that too – even for my grandparents who didn’t have the best life and were both taken from this earth far too soon.

Today my heart is heavy, many I know are hurting, and many struggle. Time goes too fast. The minutes turn to years. Still in my sorrow I am thankful. Thankful for the reminder that every day is a precious gift. Thankful for the awareness that today is tomorrow’s yesterday and that yes sorrow must be felt and experienced and even embraced, but that the moments of today are filled with incredible blessings and that each one must also be felt, experienced and embraced.

You see one day, twenty two years from now this will all be a treasured memory of the past and I don’t want to look on it with regret, but with a deep sense of sorrow; that will mean that it was done well, that all of God’s blessings were experienced fully. How awful it would be if I look back on today with gladness that it is over and done with??? When you really think it through - deep melancholy reveals a life well lived.