It’s 2:58 a.m. on Saturday night (or, more accurately, Sunday morning), and I should be in bed. Everybody else in my family is—has been for hours—and though I’m always the last to succumb to sleep, I’m not often up this late. Tonight is special. I’m delighting, as Augustus McCrae would put it, in being a live human being on the earth.
This happens from time to time—most often when I’m writing, when I’m in the middle of a scene and the words are flowing well and I’m experiencing that rare intersection where purpose and pleasure come together. It happened recently when I was playing basketball. Bringing the ball in, looking at the players, I was overcome with how much fun I was having and how grateful I was to be having it. It also frequently happens when I’m alone late at night—sometimes praying and studying, other times reading, and often when I stumble upon a movie, especially one that is, I’m embarrassed to say, highly romantic, nostalgic, or sentimental—some recent flicks include It’s A Wonderful Life, Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Doc Hollywood.
Tonight, after unsuccessfully trying to go to sleep around 12:30 a.m., I got up started watching the latest Spielberg/Hanks collaboration, The Terminal, and I knew what I was getting into when I put it on. So I sat back and let myself be swept up into the shallow, feel-good, sentimentality of the movie—and guess what? I began to feel good. And, around 2:00 a.m., as I went to the kitchen for a snack, I had one of those moments—those moments when I’m so happy to be alive it hurts.
Here’s how it happens: Suddenly, serendipitously I become aware of the sheer joy of a particular moment and I pause to reflect on how fine a thing it is to be alive in that single moment of space and time. Often in moments like these I’m also overcome with a heart-breaking sadness because I’m more acutely aware that I will be dead soon and these moments will be over. I realize how precious a thing this one moment is, and how I will never get it back again, and how I only have a very limited number of them, and then I will have no more.
This feeling had already happened twice this weekend—as I laughed my way through Friday night with friends and as I spent my entire Saturday with my family, glancing in the rearview mirror at Meleah and Micah and realizing that in just a few short years they will have families of their own and that what we have now will be forever gone.
These quick reflections make me grateful for the moment, reminds me to revel in it as fully as possible, not to take it for granted, to realize how rare it is.
Ultimately, it’s all I have, these brief moments in space and time, these little glimpses of God, of heaven and eternity, and I experience them as overwhelming joy and unbearable loss all in the exact same moment.
These moments are exhilarating and excruciating at the same time because they are so precious and so fleeting. Soon, too soon, suddenly and before we know it, all our moments will be over, and we don’t know when. This realization reminds us just how choice and brief these moments are and makes them all the more momentous.
Many of us believe that we will have other moments in the next life, better moments (though it’s hard to imagine sometimes), but this is a matter of faith, of trust and hope. All we can know for certain is what we have now—this very moment. Someone once said that no love is ever lost, that they are all kept in the heart of God. I hope that’s true. I hope that I’ll get to relive these moments again and again in the timelessness of eternity.
I hope. I trust. I believe. But for now I relish with great joy and deep sadness this precious, present moment I’ve been given. Right here. Right now.
I need to go to bed now so I won’t be so tired when I wake up in the morning, but I’m really enjoying this moment, and I’ll never get it back again, and it’s possible that I won’t wake up tomorrow at all, so I better make the most of it. Right here. Right now. In this present, precious moment, that is . . . gone forever.
2 comments:
Thank you for reminding me to remember those moments, though absolutely ordinary, that stopped me in my tracks and let me acknowledge that I was truly present and perfectly happy. And for reminding me that those moments are always there if I take the time to notice.
Moments like these are the ones that make the rest of life's everyday happenings worth looking at twice, to see if perhaps there is a moment within the happening - sweet as cake, sunshiny warm, and deliciously fabulous - that makes it worth savoring more.
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