Moments

Is it selfish to suddenly realize that the moment you are experiencing is yours and yours alone and that when you die that moment will be gone, lost forever and will pass away into oblivion. What if you have this realization? Do you ask yourself, how great is that moment? I mean, come on, sitting on the toilet is a moment I may have had but I am not about to share it with the universe. Ask yourself, how important is it.

Standing there in the sunlight, my children playing in the pool, I had what you might call a moment of clarity. Million of lives, billions, life after life sharing moments of awareness then passing into the dark, moments that may have been similar to this, or more likely vastly different, all of them lost, all of them un-… un what? Unrecorded? Unremembered?

Every moment is precious, whether we appreciate them or not. I am often annoyed by the fact that moments of seemingly no importance seem to stand out in my memory more than those that I might have so dearly hung on to.

I was a party shortly after high school graduation talking to this girl. Making small talk I asked her “Where did you go to school?”
“Um” she replied, “we went to school together.”
“Really?” I said feeling awkward.
“We walked down the aisle together at graduation and you gave me a big hug”
Now I feel like dying.

Some are poets, some are architects, others are bankers and maids and journeymen and accountants. This moment will pass and this and this and this. I imagine that the world is gone, absorbed into the vastness of space, only to be replaced by another and anther and another.

“There is a book” said the man, “that records the lives of all men.”
“Where can I find this book?” asked the student.
“The book is hidden in the most obvious of places, and is written in the most common ink of all.”
“I what is it’s name?”
“It is the name that each man calls himself. It is your name.”

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

O Lord of the universe, I see in your universal body many, many forms--bellies, mouths, eyes--expanded without limit. There is no end, there is no beginning, and there is no middle to all this.

So I begin to wonder, how different are we after all? Some are angry, some are happy, others open mouthed and ignorant or wise and mute. I read somewhere in particle physics that the path of the electron is not determined until the scientist had recorded the observation. The universe is made in our beholding and grows as we grow, expands as we expand and diminished as we diminish.

“Papa” she asked “where do we go when we die?”
“Heaven” I said.
“Where is that?”
“Its right here” I said confidently.
“Yeah right” she said dismissively, taking another bite of her ice cream cone. “You always say that.”