Small Moments

As the year ends, I start t0 get nostalgic and reminisce not only about the past year but about all the years that have preceded this one.  I tend to look back at old pictures while listening to music that held so much relevance to me years ago.  I find myself mesmerized by how a moment can be so wonderfully captured forever in a photograph and how a song can innocently rise to the surface past feelings seasoned with time and space.  This pairing of pictures and music, moments and junctures - forever frozen in time - sometimes makes me wish that I could jump back into that place, as it means more to me now than I realized at the time the photograph was taken or music was playing.

And as the new year approaches and resolutions are being made, I realize that one of my resolutions is to realize these small moments as they are happening, rather than after the fact.  For lack of my own creativity, I leave you with this great passage by Doug Copeland on the small silent moments of our lives and hope you take the essence of his writing into the new year with you:

“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.” 

-Douglas Copeland