Life is a Moment

Renowned novelists and poets have always been telling it and famous expressions such as “carpe diem”  have remained in our memory, often unfortunately to remind us when we missed that moment,  as clear as it is intangible.

If it so clear, why do we fail in seizing it and bringing it to life? I’ll tell you my thought and my experience.

Life is a string of single moments and each single moment generates the future we will live in. Our choice or non-choice in each single moment causes what we will be or will not be in the future. Every transition from one condition to another, from a dimension to another is a moment, the point of union or separation between two conditions of existence.  Death, too, is a moment, i.e. the last moment of our human life.

Our personal and genetic memory therefore contains thousands of moments forming chains of memories, each of them made of emotions, thoughts and experiences, some of them positive some other negative. However, every experience, no matter how long it is, originated from its first moment.

Before it becomes a fragment of the experience of our life, that moment is out of time and out of space. It is a moment of comprehension, the comprehension of the transition from one condition to another; the moment when our Essence can see both conditions and the futures they imply and can create its own  future. Such comprehension is intangible and we can make it tangible and bring it into our life through an action we need to take immediately. If for some reason this is not possible, we should at least write down our comprehension and, as soon as possible, take at least the first step of the action we have seen already taken in that moment.  In my experience, this is essential to maintain the connection with that moment out of time and not let it die.

Personally, I have frequently underestimated this dynamics thus generating many missed occasions, either because they could not be realized  or because they lost their authentic and original taste. The time we put between that moment and the realization of its content is a chasm swallowing its essence, leaving us only the theory and the memory of its content. Often this leads us to create “empty” things, cathedrals in the desert of which we are no more able to feel the importance and the light they had in our moment out of time. In that moment we were present as Essence. If we miss that observation point, our mental content will come into play proposing countless possible futures, but not the future we could have created in that moment.

My father died of a heart-attack instantly. I was in my early 20s, but only recently I have understood that his experience registered also in my mind became a perspective preventing me from seizing many moments. For him this was in fact the tragic moment when he lost his life, and consequently the possibility to seize any other moment of his earthly experience. I think this genetic memory of death, added to other memories with similar content, contributed to make me unable to seize moments and realize their content: I was unconsciously repeating the moment of his death, thus the moment when he lost any possibility to act. To me, this took the significance of a missed moment, thus creating a chain of the many missed moments of my life.

As told before, every event of our life starts with a moment and, depending on how we live that first moment, we determine the outcome of many events. Let’s think to a conflict for example: we could say that in the first moment of the game we decide the entire game and its result!

If we are firm on our point of observation out of the time, that is to say on the moment of transition between the two conditions, we are able to see them both. In that moment and only in that moment, we are able to chose and create a different future. If we don’t, we can delude ourselves we are actually making a choice and maybe blame our counterpart for this conflict, but actually we are not making any choice at all. Our lucid moment has been swallowed in the chasm of our mental content and in that of our counterpart and, as a consequence, we will be living in the future already determined by the emotions and thoughts implied in the conflict.  We enter the toughest memories where one must win and the other must lose.  Such mental content suggests a clash and we start a battle we could have avoided if we had taken a different decision in that first moment. Perhaps the conflict would not have appeared or we would have  found a positive way-out for ourselves and for the counterpart.

How big is the cemetery of our missed moments? Mine is quite big, not strictly speaking for the missed occasions, but for those moments when life took a turn that could have been different if I had maintained the external point of observation in the first moment of each single occasion.

In my opinion it is totally wrong, besides being tremendously stupid, to let our moments of comprehension die. They are the only “living moments” of our life, the only ones able to create a new and real future of life. If we let them go and do not seize them, they are lost and our Essence goes with them.

We should not forget we will not be able to avoid our last moment, and in that moment we will only have our Essence to rely on. This will be much stronger if we express it in every single moment of our life, thus  realizing what it suggests is best for us.

Graziella Cella
Rebis Group Blogger

Translation by Graziella Cella