Life is a Series of Moments

Laying in the freezing cold on wet grass, looking up at the stars and the full moon that’s shining brighter than the lamps on either side of me. Sarah reads me The Little Prince as I try to find familiar constellations, tracing possible big and little dippers all across the sky and probably never actually locating the real ones. I am cold but listening hard to the words of the beautiful story… sometimes words ring out with such truth. In a moment, at a loss of how to comfort the little prince, the man muses “it is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.” And it’s so true isn’t it, what a terribly strange and lonely place you enter into when you cry, and so often you are alone there.

Sometimes I feel so bewildered when I consider my life… what on earth am I even doing? Sometimes I feel so caught up in it all I become terrified, and other times I am floating far above it and everything feels so utterly pointless. Neither are very good ways to look at life.

I have learned a coping method, and that is to find and treasure the tiny beautiful moments of life I am given. They are not overwhelming or scary or distant.

This is a moment. This laying in wet grass late at night with a good friend, watching my breath float up like smoke over a sky full of stars, listening to a story. I am cold and wet and I arch my back so it doesn’t have to touch the freezing ground, but my numb hands and nose are bearable because of the story and the stars. In fact they almost make it sweeter.

There are so many important moments that I have not experienced… falling in love and marrying someone for time and all eternity and looking into the eyes of my children and sharing all these things with the people I love… sometimes I think I have experienced so little in these twenty years on the earth.

But I realize that I do have an incredible collection of precious moments I’ve gathered up over the years.

I remember being scared one night when I was seven or eight and my parents had gone to a party. We were staying at our aunt and uncle’s house, sleeping in sleeping bags on the floor, and I began to cry because I wanted my mom and dad. And Alex kept telling me not to be scared, and finally, after quietly crying for a few minutes, I felt him reach out and hold my hand. I was so surprised I stopped crying. And that was how I fell asleep, holding his hand.

Or, once, I was a young girl at girl’s camp, and during a fireside the stage was covered in eggs. I raised my had and was chosen as a volunteer for some visual lesson. I went up and was blindfolded, spun around, and then told to make my way across the stage. I just stood there, wondering what the point of this was, until finally I heard my dad’s voice coming from the other side of the stage. I was shocked- this was girl's camp, a week away from home with a bunch of teenage girls, plus I thought I had been chosen at random. He talked so quietly and gently, and he directed me through the maze of eggs all the way until I was in his arms. In that moment, when he was hugging me, I felt like I knew exactly what it would be like to be reunited with my father in heaven… relief and love flooded through me and I have never felt more safe.

Last summer I was beginning to take a medication that made me sick and hadn’t yet begun to really soothe anxiety that seemed to strangle and choke me constantly. It was the 4^th of July breakfast and I was meant to sing, and I was not only about to throw up from the morning sickness the pills gave me, but also afraid and anxious about singing. My mom walked with me a ways off in the park. We sat on a grassy hill and I tried to calm down, and after a few minutes she had me lay my head in her lap. She stroked my hair and sang me the lullabies that she sang me as a little girl, and I stopped crying out of fear and pain and started crying out of love.

Moments. My life is full of moments, some big and some so small, but so many are precious to me. When I remember these things I stop wondering why my life makes no sense to me and just accept it for what it is. Not a story, just a series of moments.