“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.”
-Alan Watts
Today was a good day. It didn’t start that way though, I was particularly exhausted and the kids and I were struggling to white knuckle through the homeschool assignment list. Productivity was not happening, so I told them to go out and play since that kind of hands-off supervision was the extent of what I could seem to handle. I was feeling pretty down about my inability to get even the things we were meant to do yesterday done, when I looked up and saw my three kids had stripped down to nothing, were covered in mud, and were laughing hysterically. The sun was shining through their unkempt hair giving them all crowns of light and behind them a buck with giant antlers sauntered on the other side of our backyard stream. My jaw dropped, letting go of my control had let this beautiful, authentic childhood scene unfold in all its wild glory.
Valuing our time based on how much we get done in a day is one of the most reinforced culturally conditioned notions in our collective psyche and therefore one of the hardest to shake. It’s all wrapped up in our definition of success, our value as beings is in what we have done, our actions. What if we started considering our days by degree of presence instead? What if rather than asking, “how many boxes…
