Every day or so, someone in my family says something that makes me stop and smile. Or laugh. Or pause and doubletake. The impulsiveness with which it happens is the best part. It’s unprompted. Unscripted. Off the cuff. It is often my intention to capture these moments somehow so that they can live on forever, providing nostalgic laughs on future days where we will gather as a family and reminisce on the good times.
I suppose this motivation to capture these moments is why so many people snap pictures of absolutely everything in their lives - what they eat, where they are, random flowers or clouds - and document their lives as a showcase of moments worth sharing and reliving.
Personally, I’ve never considered myself to be very sentimental. If all of the photos on my phone, or now my cloud storage, were to be wiped away tomorrow, I likely wouldn’t bat an eye. To me the moment itself was what was valuable, not the remembering of the moment.
Turns out I’m wrong. It’s almost funny, you know - in a sort of snickering, bitter, sort of way - how studying positive psychology can make me aware of all the things I got wrong about life. Okay… so I’m not wrong about the moments themselves being what was valuable. Living in the moment and being fully immersed in what is happening is a way of living mindfully and being fully present. However, capturing pictures and documenting our happiness allows us to reflect on all of the moments that add up to make our days and years remarkable, meaningful, and full of joy.
So, while I’m still notoriously “bad” at snapping pictures of memorable moments, or remembering to write about them, I am working on that. And, to that end, I hope you will enjoy some of the silly shenanigans that I recently was blessed to witness.
As I made a pot of decaf coffee the other morning, standing in my kitchen, my son generously began unloading the dishwasher. “Mom!” he yelped. I turned to see him gesturing at me with a coffee cup in his hand and a half-threatening, half-laughing expression on his face. “This is a stick-up!”
“Oh no!” I responded, putting my hands up in front of my face, “I see - I’m being mugged!”
Earlier in the week, my brother, a truck driver, came through town. I picked him up from his truck and, as we drove toward my house in my car, I missed our turn to get on the freeway.
“It’s okay,” my brother tells me, “Just make a U-turn.”
“I know, that’s what I’m doing.”
“Well, it looks clear. You should go.”
Gesturing in front of me I said, “No, I can’t. It’s a red arrow, Sam.”
Without skipping a beat, he replies, “You aren’t turning left though. It’s not a red U.”
“Great, thanks, I’ll just use that logic when the cop asks me why I would do something so stupid.” I laughed, shaking my head.
My daughter hadn’t taken out the trash as promised. “Didn’t you say you were going to take the trash out?” I asked.
“Mom, I said I was busy exercising and now I’m playing online with my friends.”
“Did you, or did you not, say you were going to take out the trash when you were done with your exercises?” I interrogated.
“Ugh, yes, I did. God, I feel like I’m being questioned by a judge or something.”
“Lawyer,” I corrected. “Take out the trash.”
Later, the family was piled into the car as we raced toward Los Angeles, an hour later than we had planned to be racing toward Los Angeles. “I don’t know how I could have been unclear,” I said to my boyfriend sitting in the passenger seat. “I asked if we could please, please, with a CHERRY on top, leave at 9am. And you said yes.”
“I’m sure if we get there before 11am they won’t have sold out of same-day tickets,” he speculated.
“You don’t know that. You’re speculating.” I gestured toward the clock. “You’re just saying that because we are projected to arrive just before 11am and you are trying to placate me. But on what basis do you make this claim?”
“Based on…my assumption that…” he stumbled.
“You’re assumption. Right. Baseless. They only sell tickets for same day shows. They only sell them on site. They can sell out. This is why I wanted to get there when they open. I don’t know any better than you do when they will sell out, but I’m operating on a conservative estimation to maximize the likelihood that we’ll be successful in securing tickets. You are operating on an estimation that you are pulling out of the air because you hope that it will be fine and not sold out when we get there, but you have no support for this other than the fact that you said it.” This is how I get when I argue.
“I really think that they won’t sell out before two o’clock…”
“So now it’s two? Now you have changed your projection from 11am to 2pm! Based on what? Because you said so. But they don’t care what you say, what you project. What we actually know, Blake, is that they only sell tickets on site for the same day and that it’s a Saturday in June, which makes this their busiest season. These are the facts of the case as we know them.” I heard what I had just said. “Yikes, now I really do sound like a lawyer. Great, so I should go to law school, and you should become a politician, since you seem to think that if you just say things - multiple times and inconsistently - people will believe that those things are true.” I rolled my eyes. “I just wish you would tell me the truth. If I say I want to leave at 9am and you know we aren’t going to be able to leave at 9am, then let’s talk about it. Tell me, you know, to set expectations.”
“Well, I thought it was a flexible timeline.”
I wanted to stare at him so he could feel the incredulity coming out of my eyeballs. Unfortunately, I had to keep my eyes on the road. “Okay, next time, when I say that I want to leave at 9am, I will add a line of speech to make it clear that it is not a flexible timeline. It is a deadline. That way you can treat it with the same respect as the start of a meeting time at work.”
When we arrived at our destination, we were able to get tickets for the next showing. I apologized for lawyering up.
I’m hoping that capturing moments like these will help me relax a little bit more in the future. Savoring times when I’ve been humbled might lead to me just being humbler to begin with. Let’s see how that goes.