“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
― Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
Recently my younger brother sent me a picture from 1975 of a main street in the city we grew up. I was surprised by how little the rows of shops and buildings had changed – a corner newsagent is still there, same name, four decades later.
Perhaps we were both feeling nostalgic because, only a couple of days before, I had randomly thought about my secondary school teachers and wondered which of them would still be alive.
Having entered my forties, I had to remind myself that, even though my school days seemed like a freeze frame in time, of course time had marched on just as much for my teachers as it had for me. And if they were in their forties and fifties when they taught me 25 years ago, they would now be in nothing less than a mortal danger zone! My brother mentioned that my favourite history teacher had passed away a few years ago. I found his obituary online from the local newspaper. Another former student of his had written some kind words of post-mortem gratitude. I concurred.
I had slipped into a bout of “Googlestalgia” (definition: internet surfing when feeling nostalgic). I googled a couple of other teachers’ names, half dreading that images of gravestones and neon-lit “RIP”s would suddenly jump out in the search results accompanied by a blast of a gothic male choir soundtrack. But nothing. Seems like they had been lost in time, faded from history, except to family and close friends. Pssht, I thought, how inconsiderate. Didn’t they think to achieve something of note in their post-teaching careers to get them on the radar of internet search engines, just in case a curious former student wanted to google them decades down the line to see if they were still alive?
Seriously though, all this brought into sharper focus the whole revolution of life and death, like a tank’s wheel track: the new coming up from the left, pushing the old off the cliff edge on the right. And, through an internal sigh, I acknowledged that I had myself made good headway along the same conveyor belt.
How could I reconcile myself with this moving “tank wheel track”, never stopping, never slowing down?
There are whole books devoted to the theory and practice and being in the moment, or mindfulness. I can happily confess to have never got past reading a review of these books on Amazon before deciding that I’ll give them a miss. I’m not a patient reader, and always suspect I’ll have to wade through 20 chapters on “How to just Be” (yes, capital B), before I stumble upon one, maybe two, practical points. I demand a generous reader-input to practical-value-output ratio. Maybe I’ve been working in a corporate environment of busy managers too long, but give me a 10 page executive summary and I’ll pay the same price as for the 400 pages of well-meaning rationalization behind it. [Update 2019: I’m now a subscriber to Blinkist which few had heard of in 2015 when I published this post, but they had set up about three years beforehand, so they beat me to that idea…]
As it happens, without reading any of these books, and I dare say perhaps before many of them were written, I engaged quite deliberately in my own moment of being “In The Moment”, about 20 years ago. I still remember it now, clearly. And I know it was the same concept as extolled in the books I mention.
In my University graduation year, my father passed away after a terminal illness. Earlier that year, I visited him in hospital during a course of treatment. He had his own room and was lying in bed. I spoke with him briefly and then, as another family member sat quietly at his bedside, I walked over to the room’s window and looked out over the large area of grassland next to the hospital. It was breezy and overcast, and there was a waist-high grey stone wall running across in the middle distance, with a solitary tree keeping it company. My father’s mortality hung heavy in the air and we all knew the unspoken threat would vocalize before too long.
And then, in that moment, as I stared out the window, I deliberately chose to recognise the moment I was in. I recognised that my father was here right now, with us, in this moment, and that this moment, this time, would pass into history. And that, from then on, after the moment had passed, there would be years upon years to come – all without him. I took a mental snapshot of the view out of the window, as a visual backdrop to this memory. I thought to myself that when I turned round now he would be there, in bed. But that I would turn round after looking out of windows countless times in the future, and he would not be there, or anywhere.
I was truly “in the moment”. By that I mean I felt the significance of the moment in the context of my life to come, the many years that would follow.
You may ask what the difference is between being “in” the moment and just experiencing any other moment. The difference is that I did not just pass it as we do with dozens of moments everyday; instead, I stood in it, looked at it, and looked forward from it, and then back at it from an imagined future.
I stood at the window, in silence, for a few minutes. If my father had glanced over at me I guess he would have wondered what exactly I was finding so fascinating about the view!
Having owned the moment, I let it pass and I turned around. But it had both a positive and a lasting effect on me. Positive because it made me feel grateful for the moment, with my father, and more understanding of the “conveyor belt” I was on; more accepting of the long years that would follow, my whole life ahead of me, without him. And lasting because, as you can see, I’m writing about this simple moment of silence, two decades later.