"If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice."
-Kurt Vonnegut
There are so many times in my life where I take for granted the wonderful life I have been given. I wallow in despair over the fact that I will not be able to get to live with my husband for a year. I stress over my job and school, frozen with fear of inevitable tiny failures I will make. I can't look in a mirror all day because I feel ugly. I get angry with a friend.
But,
There are moments in my life that make me realize how lucky I am to even be alive. I've had long, revealing walks with friends. I've listened to the roar of the ocean while gazing at thousands of stars on a porch. The feeling after I've written something that reveals something about me or others is one of the best feelings I've ever had in my life. All of these are moments that make me feel that I'm not alone in this crazy, twisted world.
I thought about collecting all these moments that make me feel that I am a part of something in this world. Douglas Coupland even suggested it (and explains it much better) when he wrote:
"My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.
And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives."
Though I attempted to write them down once, I found there was something significant in not allowing it to be permanent. That if we remembered every special moment, the next special moment wouldn't be as "special." Sometimes things just can't be written down, just like there are things in my heart that I will never be able to express in actual words. Who can describe the feeling one gets while looking up at the stars at night?
Even now, I flopped on my bed and looked at the ceiling, thinking of Stephen while listening to a good song. I feel so blessed to even be able to think of someone as amazing as Stephen, and know that through some miraculous event, he is thinking of me also. You probably can't even comprehend that moment, how the smell of my sheets almost still smells like him and why I smile as I think of the way he laughs at me when I do something weird. Though you can't understand mine (and might think it's super lame), you have your own moment too that makes you think, "Wow. I have been given life. What a blessing that is," even as you are dealing with troubles, no matter how small or horrible they may be.
I will end with yet another excerpt from a Bukowski poem (who do you think I am?):
there is always that space there
just before they get to us
that space
that fine relaxer
the breather
while say
flopping on a bed
thinking of nothing
or say
pouring a glass of water from the
spigot
while entranced by
nothing
that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all
ever.
