“When each day is the same as the next, it’s because people fail to recognise the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises.”
A moment… when you look out the window and feel pangs of love for the trees.
A moment… when contentment and happiness seeps from your heart when you sit down for dinner and it hits you how much you love your family.
A moment… when your husband touches your shoulder and waves of bliss travel through your entire central nervous system and produces a smile of gratitude so big it can light up the room.
A moment… when you see a teenage boy helping an old guy across the road and your heart feels like it could burst with a million sparkles of joy with the love of humanity.
A moment… when something out of nowhere hits you and the entire world feels like a technicolour dream… and you feel so blessed to be alive.
A moment… when you’re stood on the side of the tube and see 2 lovers snogging and, for some strange reason, it melts your heart because you’re so happy for them.
But then BLIP! It’s gone again. The beauty of life can hit us all at 10,000 miles an hour and then pass by again as if an imaginary train took us right to euphoria and back again in a split second. You wonder… did that even happen?
Maybe you feel these moments a lot… or maybe it’s been some time since you experienced that feeling… or maybe you never have? How can you feel those moments and hold onto them? Expand them, feel them… and make a life of them. How can you make life one big ‘moment’? Is it even possible?
YES IT IS…
It was year 2000 and I was drowning in grey London, selling my self-worth for shitty media temp jobs that sounded semi-cool enough to talk about with other ‘media types’ who had ‘real’ jobs, but only if I skipped over the fact I merely sat on a reception desk for 10 hours a day taking down wrong phone numbers and pissing off the MD’s and their PA’s (I’m dyslexic). I could pretend to actually have some value. Yet behind my “oh I work in London darling, aren’t I special” mask, hid the claustrophobic feeling of being a fraud and a failure; it felt like a noose around my neck from the moment my eyes opened each morning.
As the rat race swallowed my soul before it had a chance to fly, pegging it down into the grind of the grey, I began to lose hope in the world, myself and in my chance to ‘be someone’.
I was lost and my 21-year-old self truly assumed that because I was broke, not on the property ladder and not got a “career” that my entire life was a failure and always would be forever more. I was conditioned to believe I had missed the boat and I was just another brick in the wall, trying to be something I was not.
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
The only thing that brightened up my world was my boyfriend and my friends…and boshing a few pills at weekend on a dance floor somewhere in Farringdon. The pills seemed to pull my head out of the grey and into the magic that was ‘the moment’.
…Ah that sweet ‘moment’ when the ecstasy washes though your brain. You just wanna hold onto that moment like a supersonic train ride into the land of happiness, off into the night, out of the grey and into the light… where everyone is beautiful, strangers are friends and the coolest people you’ve ever met, and every time was happy and the whole world was at peace. Until the next morning, when the clouds washed over the remnants of the pills, the night had washed away the remnants of our wallets, we were out of fags, out of energy, out of everything and our bodies felt broken and now, the guy in the club (who we all thought was a brilliant at the time), is actually a total weirdo and we don’t even know why anyone invited him back to the flat nor how to get rid of him. Ahhh YES the moment when reality hits you like a 100-ton freight train and takes you right back broken and into the grey.
“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”
Life was getting more and more broken. I smoked more, drank more and basically did all the things that make your body feel pants and thus the grey gets heavier. Then, one day, I was on my lonely lunch break in Trafalgar Square temping for a company where no one would even say good morning to me, doing a job I had no fucking clue about. It was raining and I was alone, so I walked into the nearest bookstore and there I spent the whole of my lunch break and the last of my money on a book that sounded far too clever for me, but a friend had told me to read it and I just felt the need to buy it.
I sat outside Boots in the rain reading and smoking, I devoured that book and it changed me! I went back to work that afternoon and I read as much as I could in my fag breaks and under my desk. Then, on my walk home, walking down the Strand in the cold rain, water seeping though my broken shitty boots, I had an actual ‘moment’! So much so that I thought I was coming up on a pill.
They grey lifted and I loved everything around me, the people walking past me and the rain on my face. I began to awake to a part of me that had been hiding away, the part of me that smiled at strangers and said good evening to the man on the newspaper stand. My God this was a BEAUTIFUL DAY… and anything was possible!
There was always hope, there was a sense of faith in me and a faith in the World. My entire body was alight, my soul was singing and I felt safe… oh my, I felt so safe – everything was going to be OK!
When I got home, I couldn’t wait to tell my flatmates and my boyfriend about ‘my moment’. The drug-free high that seemed to last for at least 10 mins and kept me smiling all the way home.
Days came and went and I was seeking the high, the hit of the moment which didn’t always happen. I went back to that book store to find more books that would hit me like that book did that day but I was disappointed (the personal development shelves those days were not like they are today). However, from then I began to go on a little journey, that soon became my path.
“I don’t live in either my past or my future. I’m interested only in the present. If you can concentrate always on the present, you’ll be a happy man. Life will be a party for you, a grand festival, because life is the moment we’re living now.”
It took some time, but I began to awaken to just being contented with what I had around me. I began to accept that everything was in my power. It took years of walking a spiritual path, my own path, not that of a church, not one of rules, but my OWN soul-searching, and in that time I learned presence.
I loved my boyfriend and friends dearly and I loved people, I loved music, I loved LIFE again and I loved living in the moment. I set out on a journey to find a way to follow this passion, even though the world told me otherwise.
“Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.”
Over the past 15 years more moments have hit me… and I have been challenged and asked, ‘how can anyone always be that happy?’ – the truth is, I have had my dark days, I have healed my hurts and I have learned that I have the power to stay present and be grateful for all I have.
In the mornings I wake to my husband’s hand on my hip and I am blessed with a moment. A moment of bliss and gratitude that I am waking for one more day… I see my kids messy rooms and I smile with thanks… breakfast times are busy but sometimes I just stare out the window to watch the robins and the pigeons and see that my husband and girls are doing the same thing… and I have a moment on top of a moment! My days are a mixture of work and play and I find so much joy in everything! I still have my challenges and frustrations and I am still growing and learning, but after years and years of feeling the present moment with gratitude my days are made up of beautiful moments and I am so thankful. It is possible for everyone to feel this way, it’s a choice to feel the bliss and the gratitude and to create yourself more of this feeling, just like a magnet.
5 WAYS TO FEEL THE MOMENT:
- Give thanks that the most simple things are beautiful layers that make up the world
- Feel love for yourself
- Feel hope and trust in the future
- Know that it’s never too late
- Know that one day you will wish you had felt this moment deeper because you’ll never feel it again
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, star-dust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”
All quotes in this blog are taken from: PAULO COELHO – THE ALCHEMIST.