Skid Steers and Staying Present to the Present

One of the habits that I’m trying to forge in my fifties is the habit of being present to the present.

By personality, I’m future-oriented. I love imagining the next project and I get excited about the process of bringing it to pass, and the present frequently tries my patience.

With projects this works great. With relationships it’s usually disastrous. Just ask my wife.

If Phaedra experiences some kind of frustration, my first instinct is to try to fix it so that things will be better going forward. But she doesn’t want me to fix things. She wants me to be with her, to be in the moment, to feel things with her.

It turns out that my children want the same thing.

With our current house project, we’re looking at a lifetime of work. Some of the trees that we’ve planted, for instance, won’t reach maturity until I’m in my seventies. Re-wilding this tract of land is a futurist’s labor. And it’s tempting to keep churning forward so that I can “make the most of my time.”

But realizing that my children won’t be in the house forever also pains my heart, and it motivates me to change my ways.

This past weekend I spent eighteen hours on the skid steer. It ain’t cheap to rent these things, but it sure as heck beat the shovel and wheelbarrow approach, so I wanted to be as productive as possible.

But equally much I wanted to make a memory with my son, Sebastian.

So I invited him into the cab and he motored around with me as we built berms and levees. It was hot like the dickens and we sweated our faces off. But we had a blast doing it. We repaired the driveway. We smoothed garden areas. We moved mounds of earth. We swatted gnats away. We took breaks in order to drink our Diet Dr. Peppers. We did it together.

And it filled my heart with such joy—that God gave me this beautiful boy with whom to share such experiences.

I wrote a prayer to help myself stay present to the present. It’s in the prayer book, Prayers for the Pilgrimage, that releases next week.

If that’s you, too, hang in there. Stay present by God’s grace, as hard or painful as that may feel. And savor the moment. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true. And trust that God’s goodness surrounds you, here and now.