Moments

One of the advantages of getting older is gaining perspective. When you are young you can only look forward, the past is a blur of developmental accomplishments, minor hurts and minor excitement. (Note: of course there are always those who's youngest memory is anything but minor, but I am speaking in generalities) You are far too busy trying figure everything out, including dealing with an ever changing mind and body that you don't have time to really scrutinize what has transpired. Eventually, you start to have some perspective but that perspective is tainted by the inability to look at yourself objectively. You are your whole world and everything that happens to you is of the most amazing importance and effects you emotionally in such a way that you feel you will never recover. Your life is your family, friends and your high school, a small fishbowl existence where you only see what is in the bowl. From your perspective the great beyond looks distorted and unreachable.

Then you get a little older, you have to leave the fishbowl and enter an aquarium or a pond, maybe even a lake, river or ocean. Suddenly you gain real perspective. You are not the entire universe, everything that happens to you is not that important and the everyday things you worried incessantly over a few years ago seem beyond meaningless. Where once you could remember in painful detail everything someone said to you, what they were wearing, what you were wearing, and how you felt, suddenly the days blend together and you start to realize that life is merely moments.

When you start to turn and look back at where you have come from, you see only the moments that made you happy or sad or angry or disappointed. If you are lucky you realize that you can harness your new perspective to make the most of "moments". You can create moments that will have a profound effect on your life and the lives of those around you. Most importantly you can hold on to the feeling of those moments so that you can use that power when you need it to inspire you or keep you from doing something you shouldn't.

Learning to enjoy the moments of your life keeps you moving forward, gives you something to hold on to and something to look forward to when the day-to-day minutia overwhelms you.

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Charles Du Bos