Old Habits Die Hard

My brother called tonight and asked me if there were any "new developments" in regards to my move to Arizona. Words like "developments" scare me. I was on the phone with my mom and crying as soon as he hung up. "I don't think I can do this..." I said. My mom - after she got done laughing at me - calmed me down. She reminded me that whatever it takes for me to be comfortable with this move is what I'll have to do - but to remember to be comfortable with it. I realized talking to her, that I was just doing what I'd always done. When it comes to commitment, life-altering change or "developments" - I tend to run. I'll fall back into that comfortable spot that requires me to change nothing more than the channel on my TV. "Just keep moving," my mom said. "Keep yourself busy and doing things and work at the preparations for your move day by day. It won't seem like you're moving tomorrow. Don't give up on it...or you'll never do it." This weekend I was thinking about a lot of things. I thought about death and how sometimes when you miss someone you've lost so much...it can help imagining all the things they must be doing "on the other side of the sky". I thought about life. About how bringing a new life into the world can be frightening and exciting... And how good it is that babies don't understand how many liberties we take learning how to care for them - otherwise we'd have a lot of infants with raging, uncontrollable ulcers. And I thought about little moments in everybody's life. The day-in-day-out moments. The 'so we ended up just playing cards all night' moments. The 'we just got to talking' moments. The 'I'm so grateful to have you here at this moment' moments. As much as I love those moments...I realize how easy it is to get too stuck on them. You end up waiting around for them rather than going out and building your collection. You can hang on to that one time that you were in love - or you could go out and find it again. You can hang on to that one night when you and your best friend talked about everything until the sun came up - or go find more things to tell her about. You can hang on to the dreams of really living - or you can go live. I think more often than not we forget that to get wherever it is we're going...we kinda have to keep moving.