Living in the Moment

After twenty-fours hours of non-stop driving, my family had finally made it to our camping spot in Wyoming. I was tired and grumpy from being stuck in a car with my family for a full straight day. It’s not an orthodox thing to drive a straight day, but for our family vacation to California we had no time to waste especially if we wanted to cover 2000 miles in less than four days.

My dad is a huge nature junky so he takes every opportunity possible to add a camping trip into our vacations. Personally, I would much rather spend the night in a hotel with running water and a bed. Even though I prefer sleeping in a hotel, as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that some of the best memories I have of time with my family is of our camping trips, snuggled in a tent on a cold night. But on this specific day, I couldn’t care less about the memories we’d make camping, I just wanted to be sleeping in an actual bed. That being said, the camp grounds in Wyoming were absolutely breathtaking. Our camp site was on top of a cliff that overlooked a valley nestled between stacks of stone cliffs. It had been raining all morning but when we got to the camp grounds the clouds broke and a rainbow stretched out above the cliffs while the sun peaked out at us for the first time that day. The campsite looked like an image straight out of a nature magazine. Too bad I was too busy looking at my phone to even realize the beauty that surrounded me.

I’m really not the kind of person that lives their life through their phone, or at least I try not to be, but I had just gotten my first ever phone a few weeks before my family left on our California vacation. This meant that while my family was off hiking beautiful California trails, I was busy sitting in the tent texting my friends about my trip. I was recently looking through the pictures my mom has of that vacation and literally in a quarter of the pictures I can be seen standing in the background looking at my phone. I’m pretty ashamed of these photos, but they've made me realize I need to actually experience things instead of just looking at a screen.

Being able to live in the moment is a skill that I have yet accomplish. Instead of living in the moment during that vacation, I was wasting my time doing something I could have been doing on the couch at home. If I could relive that day in Wyoming I would put down my phone, look at the sky, and realize that nothing on my phone could ever compete with the simple beauty of nature or making memories with my family.