Lovely Moments

When I feel as if parts of my life are falling apart around me, and I am lost in a maze allowed to grow wild with uncertainty and fear and disquiet, I try to remember a lovely moment, and what I felt. Perhaps I think of the first time I stuck a full-twisting double back layout in my floor exercise. Or my second real kiss. Or possibly the moment I realized that, oh good lord, no joke, TGIM was seriously proposing to me. Or even the exact second I looked into my newborn son’s wide and dazed eyes for the very first time and he gazed back at me and I was struck by one word only: mine.

Surely I must have felt surprise and awe, but no real sense of that comes back to me. No, instead, feelings of happiness— pure and golden— warm me from the inside out, like the warm cloak of sunshine falling round me as I sit on my bed contemplating and composing this.

Admittedly, with the warmth comes the hint of a chill, because I can never fully recapture the moment. Instead, I see it all happening apart from me, a mere spectator. I watch myself as I was then, like a stranger, far removed from who I am now, and it seems so distant. So long ago. Too far away to be connected to me. But, amazingly, the happiness does connect, and flows through my body, thawing the parts of me frozen by fear and self-recrimination, and I realize that the warmth? Well, it is enough. It clears a path for me, allowing me to move forward, move on. Not yet found, but no longer lost, I resume my travel through the maze, a woman determined to make boulders in her way into stepping stones because life is short and if we want these lovely moments, we need to grab them, disappointments, setbacks, and shenanigans be damned.

And I’m thinking that right now, at this very moment, a quick trip to Dunkin Donuts is simply crying out to be my next lovely moment. Cinnamon cake donuts. Mmmm.

Lovely.

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