Every Moment Can Be Perfect
Whenever the sun is out and the clouds are nowhere to be seen, I like to stroll around my neighborhood by myself. I remember having this thought on my latest walk:
“If only there were fewer clouds, this day would have been perfect. And maybe if that man wasn’t mowing his lawn, I could hear the birds chirping… and maybe if the leaves were a bit more reddish-brown, like my favorite season autumn, I could enjoy this coffee more… but maybe if my iced coffee had a little bit more milk and sugar, surely I could enjoy this moment much more…”
I noticed that I do this every day. In every moment of my life, I live in a state of manufactured unhappiness. I don’t allow myself to be happy because I am always setting reality below my expectations. I don’t accept that things are always perfect, absolutely perfect, in the way they are currently. They were, are, and will always be in every moment.
My next thought was a sort of epiphany and repentance:
“Every moment can be perfect, if you just look for the right things.”
The way I use the word perfect might be different from how other people use it. I see perfect as the still frame of the present moment you are observing. You will never experience the same moment in your life ever again. There will never be a moment as unique as the moment you experience in each moment.
You are always living in the present. The way things are will always be how they should be. Your expectations cannot change the present state of the world, so why are you gloating? Enjoy everything for what it is and experience every moment as it presents itself to you.
That’s why I believe photographs are so special — they catch moments that can never repeat themselves.
Time will continuously flow, just as water will continue to flow downstream into larger bodies of water, but we use photographs like glass cups to capture a piece of the ever elusive stream. We can’t hope to capture all of it or stop the water from taking its course, but at least we can preserve some and take a sip of cold, refreshing water that brings us back to a moment in time.
But I digress. I realized that every moment can indeed be perfect. Every moment in your life, whether you like it or not, you can make an important choice to see life as perfect in each and every moment.
Some people like rainy days. Other people absolutely hate it. But why? Is it because we are inconvenienced? Is it because we have to go through a little more trouble to put on a raincoat or bring an umbrella and get a little bit wet on our shoulders on our way to work? Is it because we attribute our laziness and gloom to the rain clouds blocking the sun?
You can find so many reasons to hate each day. Everything could line up perfectly for us and if we try hard enough, we might still find something that displeases us. SOMETHING could be better. EVERYTHING could be better. NOTHING is good right now, and I can’t be happy until everything changes around me. Reality must bend to my expectations.
But what if you chose to see that everything is just as it is? Fortuity is a word I learned today. It means a chance occurrence. So many fortuitous moments happen throughout the day that will never happen ever again.
You can choose to believe that things happened by chance, and brush them off as coincidences. But these moments are not to be looked at lightly. If you think about it, millions and billions of interactions had to have happened for you to be reading this piece written by me on a whim on a Tuesday night. What are the odds? Isn’t the world such a strange place?
“… but is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.”
“Our day-to day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet…
— Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”
The chance that you see a particular squirrel scavenging for a nut while the man struggles with his slobbering golden retriever tugging at the leash, hoping to greet the squirrel and play with it, all while drinking your iced vanilla latte on your front steps again is probably unlikely to ever happen again.
The chance that you and your friend go on a night drive, gazing at a full moon, the night breeze blowing on your outstretched arm out the car window while your favorite song is mixed with laughs, tire screeches, and honks again is probably unlikely to ever happen again.
The chance that you text your friend about something random that was on your mind and it leads to a lengthy, deep discussion into the night about religion, politics, psychology, mythology and everything else that interests you both about yourself and the world again is probably unlikely to ever happen again.
You can try to replicate these moments. But you’ll find that no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to. Because you are a completely different person after the initial experience. You feel differently. You think differently. You are just a little bit more unique.
Time will never allow you to have those moments again. Because maybe they were only enjoyable because we could only have them once.
Maybe the past is better off in your head — because many times, when we try to recreate the cherished memories that we hold so dear in our lives, they are paler than we imagined. It is Time telling us to live in the present, and never to try coming back to the past. Because the past is often glamorized and foggy.
It’s sad to think that over time, every time we recall a memory, the picture in our head will get just a little bit dimmer, a little bit more unfocused, a little bit weaker than the last time we remembered it…
Maybe we were only meant to experience each unique moment once.
So maybe we can choose to see the perfection and novelty of every day.
Every day is a chance for you to enjoy life.
Every day is a chance for you to enjoy every experience that you come across.
Every day is a chance to love yourself and to show love to the people around you.
