Simplicity

    Driving in a car with my three daughters on a multiple hour road trip.  My oldest daughter sits in the front seat with me as she is 14 and will be turning 15 in just a few weeks now.  Does life get any better than this?  Yes I hear the normal bantering of don’t touch me or hand me the remote control (we have a DVD player in the SUV) or I bite my tongue as my daughter skips a song on the radio that I like but she doesn’t personally feel is worth listening to at the time.  All of the annoying things that add up to a family.  When I stop at a fruit/vegetable stand which has now become a tradition on the drive home from our house in Twain Harte and my daughter offers to come inside with me it brings a smile to my face and everything else melts away.
    When my seven year old holds my hand as we walk to the local Easter egg hunt whispering softly that she loves me my heart explodes and it evaporates the fight she hand only minutes before with her older sister.  How can we cherish the simple things in life and stop dwelling on the anxiety ridden issues that confront us at all angles on a daily basis lambasting us with the constant relentless reminder that our fleeting lives are never really ours to control.  How much time do we spend at work and when we are at home how much time do we spend thinking about work or actually working on our laptops in front of our TV’s.
    I am constantly telling my CFO how one dimensional he is for living his job 24 hours a day seven days a week with no real thought or effort to fill the void he feels with anything other than his occupational focus.  I wonder if he will one day find himself reflecting on his past as the steady dripping of his IV bag hanging next to his hospital bed steadily hydrates him once the inevitable heart attack takes him down his preordained path.  Will his last thoughts be about some spreadsheet or whether or not we could have earned an extra penny in our last quarter if we would have only caught that error in our reserve calculation a couple of days sooner.  Will his mind wander to any manner of work problem or will it finally focus on the three kids that he missed raising as his distant wife took the reins and played the role of both mother and father as he made his way home through traffic at 9 PM on a nightly basis.
    What is the point of living for our job if our job is nothing more than a means to pay for the lives that we are hoping to attain?  Will my kids remember the times that I sat with them and read a book or as we snuggled together watching the Amazing Race as has become our Sunday night ritual.  Will they remember the times we grabbed the hose and washed our two dogs outside in the cold as my youngest ran upstairs to get a towel for our tiny shivering 14 pound dog to keep him from catching a cold?  I don’t know if they will remember those times but I know that I will.  I will tuck them away inside me somewhere and treasure them far more than I would knowing that if I had but worked that extra 5 hours every day and skipped all those times with my kids I too might have been promoted to a job that would only further alienate me from what was most important in my life.
    At some point it seems nice to just admit that you have plateaued.  You have reached the highest summit you care to climb and from now on coasting seems nice.  This morning as I threw the ball for my lab that endlessly plays fetch I noticed the lilies outside my house and admired the different colors leading up to the front door.  God they were beautiful but fleeting as well.  They might not even be there the next time I make it up to my mountain home but there they were this morning swaying softly back and forth in the light breeze minding themselves providing a touch of color to the surrounding grass.  Isn’t it nice to take a minute and just enjoy.  You don’t even have to enjoy anything specific just take a breath, inhale deeply and relax letting it out as you just take a second for yourself.
    Life is short.  I am 42 years old and I am most likely already on the backside of the mountain and it just doesn’t get any better than this.  I am in the middle of my journey and if I don’t allow myself to enjoy it then what is the point.  Easter is about the death and rebirth of life.  Give me a shotgun and blow the damn bunnies head into a thousand pieces.  Take the commercialism out of the day and simply enjoy who you are and what you have.  I have three beautiful daughters, two great dogs and to hell with everything else.  How lucky am I.