This Is the Moment I Am In

There’s something I’ve been thinking about through my own experience of surgery, healing, and recovery.

Therapists are actually taught to be pretty careful about disclosing much about our own lives.

There are good reasons for that, of course. The therapy room is not supposed to become about us.

But I’ve also never been particularly good at pretending there is a clean line between Lisa the human and Lisa the therapist.

I am both, all the time.

Transparency and authenticity are high values of mine—not because I think everything needs to be shared, but because I believe there is something important about allowing ourselves to be seen as humans having human experiences.

And lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about time.

More specifically, about expanding our sense of it.

There are moments in our lives that feel enormous while we’re inside of them. They can feel all-consuming. Like they have always been here and might always be here.

Sometimes a “moment” is an hour.

Sometimes it’s a week.

Sometimes it’s six months.

Sometimes it’s a whole season of our lives.

But it is still a moment in time.

As I moved toward surgery and recovery, I kept trying to remember that this was something my body and my life were moving through. For a little while, my world would get smaller.

Healing would take up more space. There would be discomfort, frustration, boredom, tenderness, dependence, uncertainty—all the things that come with being a person in a body.

And then the moment would change.

Not because I transcended it.

Not because I thought positively enough.

Not because I convinced myself it wasn’t hard.

Just because everything moves.

I wonder what happens when we remember that while we’re actually inside of our lives.

Not as a way of dismissing what we’re experiencing—this doesn’t matter; it will pass—but almost the opposite.

This is the moment I am in. Can I be here for it?

Can I let something be painful without making pain the story of my whole life?

Can I let something be beautiful without trying desperately to hold onto it?

Can I recognize a season as a season while still allowing myself to experience the whole thing?

There’s something about this that brings me back to embodied awareness—the strange experience of consciousness living through a body, experiencing itself in real time.

I mean… how weird is this?

We are here.

Breathing. Aging. Loving people. Losing things. Anticipating things. Healing. Getting scared. Making plans. Having our plans interrupted. Watching our children grow. Watching ourselves change.

And somehow, through all of it, we get to notice:

Oh. This is what is happening now.

Maybe expanding our sense of time doesn’t take us out of the present moment.

Maybe it actually lets us enter it more fully.

Because I don’t have to make this moment permanent.

I just have to be here for it.

And perhaps that is part of the practice of presence: remembering that this moment is both completely real and completely temporary.

We don’t have to rush through the difficult ones.

We don’t have to cling to the beautiful ones.

We get to experience them.

To notice them.

To be changed by them.

And eventually, to watch them become something else.

Whatever moment you find yourself in today, perhaps the invitation is simply to notice:

This is the moment I am in.

And then see what happens when you let yourself be here for it.