When you decide to go and move seven hundred sixty-nine miles away, a return visit to the old home state is a gift of faces you've not seen nearly enough or nearly as often as you'd like. Yet there are time constraints and invariably not enough time. Schedules conflict and prevent reunion or the moment is simply fleeting, perhaps a quick handshake or hug that fills up the heart when a lengthy conversation is impossible. But it is all these moments, however brief, crammed into so few hours that mean the most when you tromp back over the horizon and feel the indifferent jabs of loneliness pierce your psyche during the sleepless nights that come more than you'd like to admit. It is then that the sweetest memories and moments unfurl like a flickering reel from an old movie projector in your mind and provide a semblance of peace.
Afterall, it is moments that bring us together and make a lasting impact on the trajectories of our lives. And these moments are few.
You know the ones, the fun times, the shared times, the times that make for friendships you never imagined. All the times that result in stories that we laugh at later, even though they may have been incredibly trying to our souls or excruciatingly horrible at the time. The more life-threatening, jaw-dropping, or revolting the better!
In life, the moments that seem so awful when they are happening usually end up being the most memorable, or at least noteworthy, later on, especially when they are shared with family or friends. Let us not forget the occasional workplace misery shared with co-workers, (co-conspirators one and all), eye-rolling and exchanging inside jokes at the back of the meeting. These are your people! They help make life great.
These folks are the ones you miss the most. They are the ones you try to honor with your deeds as you move onto a new path, out into a world where you seldom see those old faces. Sure, you'll have new stories to tell, eventually, but it'll take some time. So, (and I know I'm repeating myself here), these moments are few. They may be small, seemingly insignificant moments in life, but they matter most. If you can cringe while you laugh about it as time goes on, then you have succeeded.
No one laughs about those times you followed all the rules. No one tells stories about the time everything went smoothly. We talk about the remarkable moments, the surprising moments, the moments full of groans and exasperation, the moments that are full of calamity and panic. These are the times we are thinking of when we double over and roll around on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. If we are lucky, hilarity ensues when we talk about all those dumpster fires we have lived through. The best stories, the ones worth retelling, are usually about gigantic and magnificent lapses in judgement.
We don't talk about the times we head home early and get a good night's rest. We talk about the fact that we're lucky to be alive and how absolutely shocking it is that no one got (permanently) hurt! If we are fortunate enough to live through our mistakes we learn from them and they become our badges of pride. These moments become our experiential honorary degrees of life lived to the fullest. These are the moments that make for the stories we tell over and over. At the very least, these moments crack us up and that's not nothing.
They are rare, these moments. In the grand scheme of things there's not much worth taking seriously, but these short moments should be.
12-27-19
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