What Matters

August 4, 2008 | family, purpose

swim aerobics It takes so little to make my mother happy.

I swam with her and the other women at the YMCA on Saturday. I carved out a couple of days to spend with mom. She is strong again now, recouped from her scary illness in April. It was a wake-up call for me, that I might not always have forever. Funny, since that is something I talk about often, and believe.

“Do you have your swimsuit?” she asked.

“I do,” I said.

Her face lit up. The greenhouse pool at the Y was at a smokin’ 113 degrees, but the water was cool and wonderful. The aerobics weren’t strenuous, and in fact I think that most of the women just moved around a whole lot while they talked with each other.

There were lots of comments from the other 70-somethings, like, “who is this pretty young’un?”.

I love to be called young’un at 48.

Mom’s friends were sweet, and interesting. One lived in Germany for 11 years while her husband served in the military. Another was a grandma with three thirty-something children and she was raising a grandchild. Another had suffered some extreme health problems over the last year, but her concern was for my mom and her recent bout.

As I drove home I thought about my mom’s smile. It’s beautiful. It really is. She has somehow managed to keep a youthful, vibrant smile and she used it alot that day. She was happy, and it just didn’t take much.

Remember how we talked about passion last week? How we get so caught up in the busyness of life that minutes, days, years tick by and suddenly we realize we’ve invested time, effort, emotional and physical health in things that don’t mean a lot when we stop and measure it?

I’ve decided that making my mom smile is a worthwhile endeavor, and that throwing a swimsuit in my backseat and hanging out with her friends for an hour every once in a while is a good thing.

A professor just died. He wasn’t famous, until he was diagnosed with cancer. He gave a last lecture describing how he viewed life now that it was ending. To date, this lecture has received millions of hits on YouTube. His inspirational talk has caused millions to rethink what matters. I hope you’ll check it out.