Sleep, love and pausing to eat meals.  These are the things I cherish in life more than anything else.  Sleep, love and pausing to eat meals.  These are also the things that make me human.  I recently learned the value of a full nights rest on a set of brand new set of sheets that are soft and cool and flat.  This is a luxury I wish I could pass on to a weary mama somewhere.  I love swimming underwater with my eyes open feeling its thick salty sting, sloppy wet kisses from my little boys, foggy mornings, bird calls, and belly laughs.  These are thing I love.  A graceful pause in the day for a shared meal, a busy restaurant with a seat in the back for one, a cookie at nap time, these are punctuations in my day that I savor.  These aspects of joy in life are universal I am sure and all encompassing with out a doubt.  How could these little scattered chunks of time not be monumental to all.  Either way, they bring a subtle grin to my lips and show the crows feet forming at the corners of my happy eyes.  And I like that.

I have been absent from this space for two days because I couldn’t seem to find the courage to write about the tragedy in Boston, but it felt wrong to ignore it, to just write about something trivial.  I think about the people who ran and finished and how they wanted to be proud, and I still hope they can, but this terrible unforgivable act changed everything.  I think about the people who didn’t get to finish, but whose efforts should not go unnoticed.  And of course, without a doubt I think about the people whose lives were senselessly taken from them.  From their family and friends.  From us.  I think about them as I tuck my boys in, wondering how I could move forward even one step if these beds were empty.  How I could even take another breath if someone were to harm them.  If I would even have the strength.

I know the only sensible thing is to continue to savor the things that bring humans joy.  Really, the truth is, I don’t know what else to do.  Being distraught will not change a soul less mind, it will not bring back a sweet innocent one just the same.  These things that keep us sane and grinning and feeling, teaching my boys to do the same, spreading this love onto strangers and friends and parents and children, these things must not stop.  I will not give up hope that there can be less suffering.  I believe that there is a chance.   These things are here right now, right before our very eyes, and I can’t stop looking.  

Perhaps in my efforts to spread love, I will combine them.  Take a bite of a cookie and jump off a pier.  Sit in a fancy restaurant alone, lean back against the booth and close my eyes.  Kiss my boys under a canopy of singing birds.  I will do it while I can.  I hope you can do the same.