"So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment and the fleeting nature of it."
I stumbled upon these words when I was in high school, and this quote hardly meant anything to me because there was never a "him" to relate it to. But I've since realized the true meaning behind this quote, and that it has less to do with the pronoun, and more to do with the idea Margaret George was trying to express herein -- the immense power of a perfect moment in every stage of its brutally brief existence: before, during, and long, long after.
Moments are everything to me. The little ones. The big ones. The sad ones. The happy ones. The one where you sat on top of your daddy’s shoulders and knew that you were truly on top of the world. The one where you watched your hometown disappear from the window seat of a strange machine taking you up, up and away for the first time. The one when you got the call that your professor had passed away. The one where you felt your walls finally start crumbling down, where you felt a heartbeat you’d never known. The one where your new friends smushed birthday cake in your face as streamers went flying, and you laughed with the pure joy of it all.
I’ll never have any of these moments back, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Life isn’t meant to be lived in one place, and to relive the same moments would be to do just that. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to watch them go. That doesn’t mean I don’t lie in bed for hours afterward, replaying one singular moment over and over until I’m half convinced it was merely something I dreamed up – it was too perfect, too unreal, too unbelievable. Whether good or bad, these are the times when I think to myself, “No, it could not have happened to me… how is this possible?”
How is it possible to go from feeling like a normal human floating on the wind to a mess of a human cradled on the floor? How is it possible to joke with someone one moment and lose yourself in them the next? How is it possible to have a song and a promise where once there were people and laughter?
Merriam Webster defines a moment as “a minute portion or point of time.” Me? I think a moment is a lot more than just a tick of your watch, or a notch on your wall. A moment, when all the elements align, is a lifetime of memories; a movie with no beginning and no end, but an everlasting scene in your head. It is absolute bliss as it happens, or absolute chaos, but either way, it is absolutely beautiful. A moment sums up our personalities, our paths, and our lives in the blink of an eye, and then vanishes just as fast as it appeared, to make us grateful, to make us appreciative, to keep us alive. For, without moments, we are a series of routines and monotony, but with moments – fleeting as they are – we are blazingly human, and wholeheartedly here.
