Waking up to my life

Today as I was at the beach with my family, life hit me. Does this ever happen to you? It was as if I was floating along in my day, doing the tasks set before me, then WHAM I realized what was actually around me. I stared at my little girls frolicking in the sand and the waves. WOAH. I have two daughters! And this is what they look like!! I remembered back to my teen years when I daydreamed about what my children might be like some day. And here they are! And here I am! Trippy. And wait a second, look at that hot guy. That's my husband. The same guy I bitch at and take for granted a lot of the time. He's so handsome. And look how he plays with his daughters. It was like a DOSE of the PRESENT. of the MOMENT. That we so rarely allow ourselves to experience. I think it was brought on by one of my favorite authors Annie Dillard. I'm re-reading her authobiography An American Childhood and in it she writes:

What a marvel it was that so many times a day the world, like a church bell, reminded me to recall and contemplate the durable fact that I was here, and had awakened once more to find myself set down in a going world.

and...

Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

and...

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilirated with a yelp and a gasp. Who could ever tire of this radiant transition, this surfacing to awareness and this deliberate plunging to oblivion - the theater curtain rising and falling? Who could tire of it when the sum of those moments at the edge - the conscious life we so dread losing - is all we have, the gift at the moment of opening it?