Parenting Australia

2010 - The Year of the Moments

Hi Y’all. I’m signing back on for the New Year. Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful festive season. Wasn’t it so great to just turn off and tune out, if only for a little while? It’s also the time of year when a lot of us look within, reassess life and newly commit or re-commit to sage goals.

I think it’s a great thing to do. It may just be the only time of year where we stop long enough to have a thought that is not about churning through the day. And life has to be about more than churning through the days, right?

I started the holiday season with one goal in mind – to be present for my family. Not as in wrapped in paper and tied up with a bow. Not that kind of present. Present as in – Being There. Listening. In the Moment. The opposite of absent.

Mihiri Udabage

Too often, I find myself physically present, but mentally elsewhere. Rarely do I ever do one thing at a time. I’m listening to the children’s reading, while cooking dinner. Talking on the phone, while checking emails. Chatting to the neighbour, while watering the plants. I’ve even moved my hand cream and nail file into the car so I can attend to that while sitting at the traffic lights. Life is so engineered to do multiple things at once, to rarely be still, that much is achieved, while the moments are lost.

This year I am committing to Being Present. I worked out the key is to do one thing at a time. I know, I know, how will everything get done??! After I hyperventilated for a while and did a mental checklist of everything that needs doing, like yesterday, I stopped for a moment and considered the pay offs. If I was to be present to doing one thing at a time, it is possible I would:

• never burn another dinner
• remember what TV show I was watching in between the ad-breaks
• notice the mould on the bread before serving it up to the kids
• switch the iron off

and more importantly, I would:

• complete things properly
• listen fully
• be accessible
• be a better friend to others
• catch the moments

Yes, 2010 will be The Year of the Moments. And I look forward to sharing many of them with you!

What do you want to achieve in 2010?

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Mihiri Udabage is a 30-something mother of two, now feeling old enough to use terms like 30-something. She loves Sundays more than Saturdays but is grateful for both. She hates ironing. In between growing up two little citizens, Mihiri spends time working on her on-line Fair Trade and Organic business www.generationwonder.com, volunteering for global charity Room to Read, doing canteen duty at school, and entering Fun Runs she has no hope of actually running. Mihiri has a husband who thinks she is loopy but who supports her anyway. She wishes she had written Twilight but acknowledges that could never happen because she can never remember her dreams. However, Mihiri is about to enrol in a screenwriting course that will see her write a movie that will knock Twilight for a six. Mihiri continues to dream...

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