Moments

It is interesting to me the times at which inspiration, (revelation, enlightenment; whatever you choose to call it,) strikes. One moment we may be doing a mundane task, and the next a thought floods into our mind that we have never experienced before. We did not know, the second before that revelation came to us, that in a blink of an eye our minds and hearts would be forever colored, and our perception of everything around us altered, by a newly revealed truth which we did not know, or perhaps did not fully understand the moment before. We, as humans, are static beings. With each moment, we ebb and flow like the tide. We are never the same person. We are shaped in the infinitesimal ticking of the little hand on the clock. From second to second, experience to experience, thought to thought, we are changed.

I had one of those simple, powerful, revelatory moments this evening. I was in the shower, and I began to watch the streams of water fall from the shower head. As I focused on them, I became more aware of the individual drops which made up the seemingly constant stream of water. I became conscious of each drop of water on my hands. And I realized something. Each drop was different, it was unique. No drop was quite the same, nor had it traveled exactly the same trajectory. Each drop struck my skin for a moment and then was gone. I was overwhelmed with the ephemeral nature of it all. I felt saddened and amazed at how temporary It all was. And, as moments such as that tend to encourage, I began to think.

I thought about life. I thought about moments. I thought about eternity. I thought about the vast expanse of difference between the two, but at the same time I thought about the intimate interconnectedness of them as well. I reflected on the moments of my day, my year, my life and the significance they had had on shaping who I have become. I pondered what the moments of the future could bring. I realized something; I realized that eternity is constructed of fleeting moments. Every second holds eternal significance. Every heartbeat, every thought, every action, every desire, every experience becomes a thread woven into our tapestry. Every thread is different, and while some threads may be the same color, the same length, be made of the same type of fibers, they are still different threads. They are not the same thread and never will be. If that thread was removed, in the end the final tapestry would be less because of it. So it is with our lives. Every moment is a detail in the final masterpiece of who we have chosen to become.

As I pondered, I thought of a quote from Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, which states the importance of the individual moment quite bluntly:

“There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time … If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change? You don’t have time for this display, you fool. This, whatever you’re doing now, may be your last act on earth. It may very well be your last battle. There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to live one more minute.” 

How would our manner of living change if we came to understand and internalize the eternal significance of each and every second that we live?  Would we permit the little inconveniences of this life to anger us? Would we succumb to fleeting temptations and passions? Would we live for immediate gratification if we recognized that the momentary pleasure in which we indulged would have delayed and eternal consequences? Would we love more? Or more than that, would we show our love more? (Because yes, it is very possible to feel love and not always live that love out loud.) Would we be more hopeful and optimistic, knowing that every trial is just a matter of a chain of small and fleeting moments- a series of similarly colored threads that must and do eventually come to an end? Would we waste our precious time on things of inconsequential nature? Would we set our hearts on the temporary things of this world? Would we center our souls more on eternal objectives?

I believe that if we could truly fathom the gravity of each moment, it would forever alter our patterns of behavior and lifestyle. We are told in the Book of Mormon to “be wise in the days of [our] probation,” (Mormon 9:28) and warned that “awful is his state” (2 Nephi 9:27) of him that wastes this probationary and fleeting period-this mortal life. I catch myself doing this much more than I’d like to admit. It is easy to fall into the same pattern of folly as the character being addressed in Castaneda’s aforementioned novel. I tend to believe that I have an entire lifetime to achieve success, to reach my divine potential, to become the kind of person my Heavenly Father knows I can be and wants me to become. But a cognitive framework like that is fatal to progression. It is the root of habitual procrastination. Because this life is not long. In the scheme of eternity, this life is that fleeting moment. This life is that drop of water. This life is a single thread in that tapestry. Am I making this clear? What we need is a paradigm shift-a realignment of our sense of time. Eternity is not possible without the single moment. The single moment means nothing without the promise of eternity. I guess what this all boils down to for me is that I want to live in the moment, but not for the moment. Does that make sense? I want to live my life in a way that I am cognizant of the critical nature of every moment and everything I do, but I refuse to live in a manner that only seeks the rewards of each moment. Eternal perspective. We should find God in the details of our lives-we should include Him in each and every millisecond that we live and breathe. And as we do that, as we consciously act and utilize our time of probation, something beautiful happens. We create a masterpiece of our lives. When this momentary life has come to an end, we will be able to take a step back and look at the full grandeur of the tapestry we have created, and smile. We will smile because we will know that we picked out and very purposefully placed each and every thread. We will have created our eternity out of the moments.