Our “Moments of Life”

Dear Friends,

The most reliable places to find meaning and love in your everyday life are in moments that affect you emotionally and move you most deeply. I call these "Moments of Life". The most reliable places find moments of Life are in the connections you make. I am not referring to your business connections, of course, but to the connections of your heart and mind. The people and the places that you love. The part of work you really care about. The children you raise, the friends you trust and the pets you adore. The garden (or something you are passionate and compassionate about..) that you love Even the performing teams you fanatically root for.

All these connections lead to moments of Life. We hold these moments in our hearts, long after they occur, and feed on them when we are hungry for something to lift our spirits, or simply for something that we believe in and care about. John Keats, The poet who wrote almost two centuries ago: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections.” The moments of our life are  the holiness of the heart’s affections, the importance of our most heartfelt connections and the moments of Life they lead to every day in so many different, wonderful ways.

Life is just a series of mostly forgettable events unless we love, and love in as many different ways as we can, from loving a person to a book to a place to an idea to a dog-to almost anything. With love, we endow certain moments with a special power and significance. With love, and its cousin, imagination, we conjure up the richness and power that lies beneath the surface of even the most trivial second in our lives. By the power of love and imagination we turn ordinary, inert moments into  moments of Life, those moments when we feel connected to someone or something outside of ourselves and in the presence of what matters, what we call meaning of life.

Heartfelt connections and the moments of Life they engender are what make life good. Of course, how we rank them changes over time. When I was in high school my vision of heaven was sitting on the third row of a never-ending game of cricket that I was guaranteed the Indian team would ultimately win. Now, my vision of heaven is sitting at a table in some restaurant where my friends and family are eating a dinner that goes on forever.

But until we get to heaven, nothing goes on forever. We don’t have time to wait. We have to make these connections matter now-these relationships, passions, and interests-if we are to draw out of them all the juice they have to give.In this world most of us actually have what we need to be happy. The challenge is to make what we have matter-matter now, today-and matter enough.

The basic ingredients of a happy life are simple. They include friends and neighbours; relatives; some work you like; perhaps some pets; a club, or a religious affiliation, or a team; maybe a garden or other passionate pastime or hobby; maybe a good book or a movie; and some hopes and memories, too. To relish the full pleasure of these connections, we have to delve deeply into them and make the most of them. We have to nourish them so they become as strong as they possibly can be.

But how? It is one thing to say it, another to do it. I often stop and wonder if I am doing it right in my own life. For example, as a parent, I give my kids a lot of my time, but someday I probably will wish I had given more. Who can ever give their kids all the time they wish they could? There isn’t that much time available, even to the idle rich (which I am not) because childhood is brief. And after our children’s childhoods are over, who doesn’t wish for one more day–one more sunny afternoon in the beach–when our kids were young

The regular regret everyone of us have today is " I did not live in the moment enough". This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: lunch, bath, work,book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little bit more and the getting it done a little less.

What we’ve already got is with us now, aching to be noticed and delved into. We need to take care of our most heartfelt connections-persistently, deliberately, lovingly-before they disappear.We need to make time for all the people and places and projects where our hearts have set a significant mooring. To do this, we have to get rid of the insignificant ones. We have to get rid of what hurts us or wastes our precious time, if we possibly can, so we can involve ourselves fully in what and whom we love. I think this is the secret to a happy life.

Our loving connections beget meaningful moments, like a magical plant that blossoms all year round. The flowers of these healthy connections are what I call “moments of Life.” They grow before our eyes in a million different ways, and they blossom day by day.

Moments of Life happen unannounced, and then they disappear, like names drawn in the sea shore sands. But if we capture them-by noticing them and letting them matter-they can infuse our daily lives with meaning and with love forever.

This is how we cherish what we have: by not looking past it, by not saying to ourselves, But this isn’t what I really want, it isn’t what I have been waiting for my whole life long.

But what about the millions of dollars I might have wanted, the perfect marriage, perfect children, fame, power and who knows what else, maybe perfect body? No one has it all. Instead, we have this thing called life. Like an unnoticed child, life so wishes we would take notice. If we do that, it repays us, as that child would, with more than we ever, ever dreamed possible. It gives us the treasure of moments of Life, the blossoms of connection.

It is in connection that we are most fulfilled. The feeling of connectedness goes with us everywhere we go. It is the most stabilizing, comforting feeling there is. Start counting and living your moments, the sole of purpose is to live those moments of life and leave behind those sweetest moments for your near and dear ones when you sign off.

God bless your moments of Life. I wish you most of more of those moments 

Cheers

DC*