Living the moment...

A moment is something that cannot be captured or contained...just enjoyed. This is the realisation I have come to over the past few weeks. Yet, despite their lack of tenacity, moments are important. Moments are pinnacle points in life; ones we look on with either pleasant reminiscence or hasty omission. They are like the peaks and troughs on a heart rate monitor; the defining moments in a life which otherwise would otherwise make it a boring and lifeless existence.

Opportunists say to “live in the moment” while realists say “moments are fleeting”. Which do we do? Do we just keep living for the next best moment, while proudly nursing the scares of the bad ones? Or do we long for stability, and normalisation, believing that both good and moments will come again, so life is really just mediocre?

I’ve done something new in the last few weeks, in just really trying to experience the feeling of each moment. Just really being there, observing without judgement, how I feel, what I do, where each moment takes me next. And trying to breath positive energy into every experience. Living the moment, having an experience, taking the good with the bad, and just being happy it happened.  

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened" is my favourite Dr Seuss quote. How often we don’t realise things are not happening to us, we are making them happen. My best surfing analogy in this case would be an awesome moment I experienced two weeks ago. I went out for a paddle, struggled to paddle in for a while, until I aligned myself to just having fun, and stumbled on an awesome rip. A rip that literally pulled me in so fast, that I suddenly found myself being pulled out to sea; no paddling required. I had a few seconds to turn around and catch a monster of a wave that I had been struggling for so long. I guess all along I had been making it happen, but when the moment came, it was better, brighter and more awesome that I could imagine.

So I think how often, without positive energy and directional thinking, we miss the opportunities of moments coming along and sweeping us of our feet? How often do we miss out on capitalising on the moment due to sheer ignorance and boredom with life.

I finish with my favourite quote from Paulo Coelho about magic moments: “The magic moment is the moment when a “yes” or a “no” can change our whole existence. Every day, we try to pretend that we do not see that moment, that it does not exist, that today is the same as yesterday and that tomorrow will be the same too.”