So it is not very often that I would write about a quote from a sitcom as being a great life lesson, but this particular quote was so good that I haven’t been able to get it off my mind, so I figured I had better write about it today.  It was a quote from the final episode of the television series The Office when they are all looking back at the great memories they had over their nine years working together and Andy Bernard says to the camera,

 “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them”

That quote really hit me.  Perhaps because it is so true.  We rarely recognize how amazing the moments of life are until they are behind us and we are looking back, and then we think “Wow, I wish I realized how great that time was while I was living it”.  Which is really a shame if you think about it.  Because in the moment we couldn’t see that.  We couldn’t appreciate how awesome it actually was.

I was expressing to my 17 year old daughter this weekend that it took seeing old photos of myself at her age to realize that I wasn’t overweight like I thought I was at the time, and I wish I had appreciated the body I had back then instead of constantly tearing myself down thinking I looked awful, especially now that I would trade that past body for my current one in a heartbeat!  I don’t want her to ever not recognize that she is amazing just as she is right now.

I think a lot of us do that.  We don’t see it until is gone and then we think, “if only I had realized it at the time.”  But I certainly don’t want to live my life like that anymore.  I don’t want to wait until I am sick to realize how lucky I was when I was healthy.  I don’t want to wait to have someone gone from my life to realize how blessed I was to have them every day.  I don’t want to have to wait until the moment is passed to see how awesome it was and how lucky I was to part of it.

I want to start to see it right there and then as it happens so I can savor every second of each experience.  I want to appreciate every friendship and every day that I am healthy and every challenge I overcome as I am overcoming it.  And so I am going to use that quote as a way to remember that I want to love my life as I live it!  I want to enjoy it as its happening and appreciate each moment for being a good day, not a good old day.

As we all head into this new week we should all know that these are the good old days right here and right now, so let’s not wait until we’ve left them to realize that. Let’s LOVE OUR LIFE WHILE WE LIVE IT!

~Amy