I don’t get a lot of downtime and I am rarely alone. Quite frankly, I don’t often sit down and silence is a strange and very unusual sound for me. I do not have significant blocks of time to myself.

I am though, cultivating my ability to savor tiny, miniature moments that I can carve out of my days here and there. I grab these little moments where and when I can. When that’s all that you have, you hang on to them tightly.

On Monday, I decided to clean the pool. When I don’t want to do other chores, I clean the pool. I sprayed and scrubbed, skimmed and vacuumed. As always, I brought my favorite, waterproof speaker with me and tuned Pandora to ’80’s Pop’. When I realized the sun was strong and hot, I decided my bathing suit was in order – because the more skin I can get into the sunshine, the better! I noticed the pool was sparkling blue, clean and clear. I also noticed that no one was calling for me, my Adirondack chair was within reach and ZZ Top, Robert Palmer and Culture Club were streaming from my speaker. I had the ingredients for a delicious little break.

So I plunked myself down in my yellow chair in one of my favorite spots – my tiny deck, in the tiny yard of my tiny house with my favorite decade of music swirling around my head. I put my feet up on the warm, wooden railing and tipped my head back. With my eyes closed, it might as well’ve been Tahiti.

Dennis asked what I was doing. ‘Nothing’, I said literally. I did that for the 17 minutes it took my phone to run out of batteries. My perfect little capsule of leisure came to an end and I commenced my ‘real’ chores and the rest of my day.

On another day, I found myself kidless (what?) with a few extra moments between appointments. My sister called me on my cell and asked me what I was doing. What I was doing was sitting in my car in the Shoprite parking lot with the AC blasting, eating a salad that I didn’t make, listening to Neverwhere by Nail Gaiman on Audible. All. By. My. Self.

My sister laughed at me when I told her I’d have to call her back.

I adjusted my chair for maximum legroom and adjusted the temperature controls further towards the little blue snowflake. I snapped open the clear plastic lid of a super-market salad bar salad. No chopping for me – just pure enjoyment. Neil Gaiman’s dreamy voice and fetching accent narrate his own books. Thank God. I’ll save Neil Gaiman for another post – I am late to discover his cache of books and am REALLY sorry about that.  I had exactly 20 minutes to kill. Just enough.

And it is just enough. But I have to watch for the moments so carefully. They are like the little blocks in Tetris that begin to pass in front of you so quickly and if you don’t watch carefully, you are not sure how they fit in until they are going so fast they stack up and end your game! I watch for them coming and realize I can fit that little piece in – right here, right now.

Because those little moments of bliss –

You gotta grab ’em.