DivingBoard

The older I get, the more my body feels the sleep that I am not getting.  Soon enough it all catches up and I find myself unable to get up some days, fatigued from weeks of running on 3 or 4 hours of sleep.  Tonight will be one of those sleepless nights and as the clock glares at me past midnight, my mind remains surprisingly active and, apart from my eyes feeling a little dry, I feel like I can go for a few more hours.  It's so manic, this lifestyle of grading and reading and teaching and writing.  I feel like I can never get away; this very moment is supposed to be my writing break and I find myself, well, writing some more.  And as I type these words, I am slowly emptying my mind of some burdens, both professional and personal, and I find myself regaining some sort of equilibrium, albeit fleeting. 

There it is again.  More and more I think and write about the ephemeral moments of life.  Perfect moments where suddenly you find that you are gazing down onto your own reality, watching yourself move and interact, framing it in your head, storing it in hopes of accessing it later, outside of yourself and yet wholly within yourself too.  Is that what it means to live in the moment?  I mean, I know what it means to live in the moment: to appreciate the now, to not look beyond the present, to avoid over thinking, to do and say with precisely what feels right, right when you feel it.  But for a classic Type A like me, living in the moment feels like a myth, an urban legend, the chupacabra of lived experiences.  I plan, make To Do lists, make mental lists, fill up my calender and color code the clothes my closet and the books in my shelves.  That's who I have always been and living in the moment is something that I have to force myself to do, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Perhaps it is the accumulation of years that have led me here, but lately I have come to realize that these perfect events are quite temporary, that while for some they may come often or others few and far between, it remains true that these experiences have beginnings and endings and if we fail to recognize their preciousness at the precise moment of impact, we can never regain what is lost and worse, we can never recall the feelings of joy or contentment or accomplishment or peace associated with that experience.  And while we may have more moments just like that one, we will never have the same exact one.  So when I find myself enjoying a perfect morning with a great cup of coffee, or dancing with my friends, or hugging my niece during the holidays, or singing songs with my cousins, or sitting on the couch laughing with my brothers in the house where I grew up, or strolling through a flea market holding hands, or realizing that my students and I are actually enjoying discussing a book, I try as best I can to hold on to those feelings, store 'em up in my heart and in my brain so that when things get tough or sad or even just plain boring, I can summon up those moments and those feelings in order to ease the bruises in my soul and regain some lost balance. 

To live in the moment for me will always be hard because to do that, all the damn time, would be to forsake a fundamental part of me which tends to look ahead, always in search ways of doing things better, of striving to be better.  Ultimately though, our grand narrative is nothing but a collection of these fleeting moments---happy ones, tragic or sad ones, banal and ordinary ones too.  To live a life that is full, for me, means looking ahead toward new horizons to conquer, looking back in order ground and anchor one's self, all the while striving to recognize that right now, where I am in space and time, is exactly where I need to be and I have to be okay with that because I know all too well that in a minute things will change and then it's on to the next.  So I celebrate these ephemeral moments and if that's what it means to live in the now, well then I am happy to report that right this second, I am here languishing in the transient beauty of it all.