published Wednesday, January 8th, 2014 at 6:39 pm by twoods
In a single moment you can experience beauty, gratitude, and love. In another single moment you can experience life, death, and tragedy. The good news, you are alive and get to experience it. If you are not attuned with the single moment, then you miss the magic that a moment offers you.
When I look back at this past year, and partner getting hit by a drunk, and three men in my life dying, and a client of mine passing, then his sister killing herself, and me having both my knees replaced with two different surgeries. From where I am sitting currently in this single moment, it all seemed to happen at once, but it all happened in a year. That is 365 days. I know it is hard to believe, but life happens one moment at a time not all at once. One moment happens, and then another moment will follow. That is how time works and we cannot change that. Though it may feel like it happens all once, it does not.
Everything that happens in our life happens in the the very present moment. To top it off, everything that ever has happened and that will ever happen can only happen in the present moment. You see, it is simply impossible for anything to exist outside of it. Therefore, what happened yesterday is just a mental concept in my head, or a memory as it is called. When I begin to understand that life happens a moment at a time, I am able to breathe deeper and more fully. Life gets complicated. We cannot avoid that. That is why we call it life. There will be life and death, health and illness, happiness and sadness. There is so much to do, people to see, places to be, jobs to get done and chores to take care of. When I look at doing life, just as it unfolds, one second at a time, everything becomes more manageable.
Life offers us events every moment that shape us. Events can include birth, death, illness, pain, sorrow, happiness, recovery, love, hate and more. If we stay in the moment of each of these events, we soon get the opportunity to discover how we want to deal with it in the moment. We can turn an event into chaos and drama or into a learning opportunity filled with lessons and growth. The positive thing is it is your moment and you get to decide what you want to do with that moment.
In order to grab onto the moment, I think we need to realize that life happens quickly sometimes. It seems like a moment is a second, or that a month is only a few moments. I felt that way when I sat in hospice with my cousin. I tried to savor every single moment and thought if I savored it enough, I could squeeze a few more seconds out of every moment, however, I tried so hard to get extra moments that at times, I missed the very moment in front of me, and my dear cousin, who was my dearest friend was gone. A few months later I sat in hospice with my father and the moments could not go by fast enough as I wanted his suffering to end. I could stare at him, and stare at the clock and wait for him to take his last breathe, and those moments felt like hours.
What I learned from this is a moment is a moment, it is 60 seconds, it is not 75 seconds, and it is not 60 minutes, it is 60 seconds. I can almost hold my breath for 60 seconds. A moment is not that long, however, when we come to terms, that a moment that life happens a moment at a time, I believe life becomes more manageable.