The two moments that stopped me on my tracks today: this swing in its gold and lemon shiny surroundings and a giant, impossibly yellow hunter moon calmly looking over a brightly lit football field.

Today I had to force myself to go for a lunchtime walk. It was a beautiful autumn day, the “so beautiful it’s almost sad” kind and I couldn’t unglue myself from my computer screen. I realize that I am getting into an obsessive phase when I live and breathe my work. I’ve been there before. I stop eating. I think about my work while walking, sleeping, playing with my kids, I just can’t stop. The work starts consuming me. This week, there were several times when I forgot to eat or simply decided not to. There was a morning when I got up and ruched to write up an application form. This is not healthy. I love my work. I am passionate about creating new worlds, following the threads of thinking into the unknown, I love feeling how clarity emerges through the fog of complexity. I love feeling bold and creative, “determined and afraid of nothing.” Maybe, because I never feel this way about myself or in relationships. But I have to admit that this is another way I avoid being present.

I was looking at the sunset over reservoir today and thinking of something I said in a conversation not so long ago (funny, how every advice we give is actually the advice for ourselves): it is hard to let go of a good thing. My work is a good thing. It is good for me and for people around me, but I have to let it go in order to be present in my life. I don’t want to quit, I am not quitting, but I have to put a loving boundary between the thing I love and myself. I don’t want to miss another brilliant autumn day because I was obsessing over difference between community mobilizing and organizing. I don’t want to walk through life without noticing life. The cries of the departing geese. The purplish red of wild sumac leaves. The changing colour of the sky: from pinkish to turquoise to dark blue. I want to be present.