So, today was day one of Deepak Chopra and Oprah Winfrey’s 21 Day Meditation Challenge. My sister, a life coach, is promoting this on her website, so I decided that I would give it a whirl, since I was looking for a low calorie alternative to a bottle of wine in order to wind down at the end of the day.

The mantra, or intention for the day was “today I am open to the presence of miracles.” OK, I wrote that thought down so I could keep it in the forefront of my mind all day, in preparation for my meditation in the evening.

Let me just say that I had already forgotten to keep the mantra in the forefront by about 10am, and soon, the day spiraled into a day in which I  most definately needed a wind down….

Just as noon rolled around today, I got a text from Downtown Dad saying that our daughter Kelsie’s car was still parked downtown in front of the restauant where she works, with a couple of tickets on the windshield.  She hadn’t come home the night before, which isn’t all that unusual for our nightowl 22 year old, but it was curious.  We tried calling and texting her, but didn’t get a response.  Over the space of an hour, we were starting to get a little rattled.

I decided to resort to the Sprint phone locator service we pay for.  The map showed up with a location within a clump of trees, off to the side of some tennis courts in the park across the street from the building where we work.  Hmmmm, ominous.  This is also across the street from the restaurant she works at, some apartment buildings, and where her car was parked.  We were very aware that this locator service is not exact, and it might be anywhere from several feet to several hundred yards from where her phone actually was.  But we walked over to the park anyway.  I don’t know what we expected to find… her phone?  Her body?  We found neither, but did see a dumpster, and two locked porta potties. At that point, my imagination started to run away with me.

Now maybe I watch too much CSI, but I started imagining all sorts of scenarios, and none of them were pretty.  We both started to full on panic.  We knew she was on the closing shift, so we walked to the restaurant, talked to one of the guys who’d worked with her last night.  He tried the numbers of a couple of the others she left with.  No response.  We started messaging her Facebook friends, and friends of friends. We wondered whether or not we should report her as a missing person, but it had only really been an hour since we noticed that anything was unusual.

Downtown Dad used his extra set of keys to  move her car out of the ticketing zone, and then we went back to work.  We watched the social network world start to light up with concerned friends trying to contact our little fugitive.  Then, at about 2:30, DD noticed the car was gone.  We waited for a phone call, once she’d gotten home and plugged in her dead phone. Sure enough, she called, quite confused about what all this fuss was about. Turns out, there was no foul play – did I really think there had been? She had just stayed over with some friends talking until the wee hours, and forgot to move her car.  Not unusual.  25 missed calls, several Facebook messages, and texts from all over, even from a guy on a Harley in the middle of South Dakota on his way to Sturgis!

Turns out, she really does have a pretty great web of friends, even though we don’t know all of them like we used to when she was little, they are still kind enough to indulge two overly dramatic and tightly wound parents.

I got home this evening, and put on my headphones in a quiet darkened room and started to let Deepak’s soothing accent  guide me on my first meditation.  It was then I remembered the mantra for the day.  “Today, I  am Open to the Presence of Miracles.” Well, even if it had been a crisis of my own escalation, I had a very rare opportunity to witness the strong bonds of friendship my little girl has built as she’s grown into a confident, self sufficient young woman.  I was absolutely in the presence of miracles today. Boy howdy, was I ever!