Sarah's Thoughts: One Day You Will Want This Tuesday Back

**Sarah Grynberg** (0:02)
What if the life you've been waiting for is already happening, but you're too busy to see it? I'm a mindset coach, and this is the question I ask my clients more than almost any other. Let me tell you about a Tuesday afternoon.
Nothing special happened. I was in the kitchen making dinner. My teenager was sitting at the bench, still in his school uniform, telling me something about his day, something small, something I've probably already forgotten the details of. There was music on, the light was coming in through the window in a particular late afternoon way that makes everything look just a little bit more golden. And for a moment, just a moment, I stopped what I was doing, and I looked at him, and something in my chest tightened. Because I knew that in that moment, that one day, I would give almost anything to be standing in that kitchen again. Listening to that story, I half heard, watching that beautiful, beautiful light. So why I'm telling these stories is because I want you to know that we're conditioned to mark the big moments, like the birthdays, the milestones, the first day of school photo and the last day of school photo, and everything we frame and post and save. We treat those as like these really special moments and the ones that are worth showing up fully for. But I've done this work long enough to have sat with enough people looking back over their lives with tears in their eyes to know something that I wish with my whole heart someone had told me earlier.
The moments you will miss most are almost never the big ones. They are those Tuesday afternoons I was speaking about. The school runs where they talk the whole way and you're only half listening because you were thinking about your to-do list or the Saturday mornings where you had nowhere to be and everyone was still in pyjamas, nobody rushing, or maybe it was the conversation in the car out of nowhere when they told you something real, something that they'd been carrying and you had to keep your eyes on the road so they wouldn't see your face. The night that they fell asleep on the couch next to you and you didn't move for two hours because you didn't want to wake them. The moment maybe you tucked them in, leaned down and whispered that you loved them more than all the stars in the sky and all the grains of sand on every beach in the world.
They smiled with their eyes already closing and you stood in the doorway for just a second longer than you needed to because somewhere in the back of your mind, you already knew even then that this would not last forever. None of those moments announce themselves as important. Every single one that I just mentioned just look like an ordinary Tuesday. The neuroscience is really profound here. Research shows that our brains encode memories more strongly when we are emotionally present and not distracted. The moments we were fully there for get sorted differently to the ones we move through on autopilot, which means the life we remember is not the life we lived, it's the life we actually showed up for. And I really want you to remember that. The Tuesday afternoon you're in the middle of right now is one of those moments. You just can't see yet because it hasn't become a memory yet, because the light is still coming through the window and because you're still in it. The life you're trying to build is not waiting for you on the other side of the busy season, it's not somewhere in the future tense. It's right now, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday, while something completely ordinary and absolutely irreplaceable is unfolding all around you. So put the phone down, turn around and look at your beautiful kids, not later, but now.
Because one day, and I say this with so much love, one day you'll close your eyes and try to remember exactly what they look like right now. At this age, in this kitchen, with that school uniform still on, and that story still tumbling out of their mouth. And you will want nothing more in the world than one more Tuesday afternoon with them, exactly as they are today.
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