I Don’t Want You to Miss This.
A slightly sappy pontification about what matters. Call it a note to self.
I don’t want you to be a little old lady with an ER bracelet cuffing your veiny right hand, suddenly remembering what matters and then realizing you’ve missed it.
I don’t want your cliche life flashback montage to be like a car driving passed blurred trees and trash cans only the trees are people that made you feel loved, and the trash cans are activities you once knew how to enjoy.
(Selfishly, I hope your whole life-flash-before-your-eyes vignette is represented in your subconscious by a walk popping into loved ones’ homes for tea, or crashing their parties, or executing a flash mob, maybe all getting kidnapped by a band of merry pranksters heading down to Mexico in a school bus. Maybe you will have a cool guide like Gerry Rafferty or Mithrandir.)
Missing out on the meaningful is not overlooking what matters. It’s more quietly passive than that. A byproduct of distraction and noble busyness. Getting caught up in the droning, rotating cylinder of what unloving opportunists, corporate monkeys, or scared caretakers tell us matter, and believing it. This devotion to seemingly important deceptive nonsense will continue until we actively decide to change.
Only we get to define what matters. And yet we humans aren’t complicated. It’s usually stuff like quality time with people you like. Uncontrollable laughter. Noticing the variation in sunlight through the seasons. The grilled cheeses mom makes when she’s buzzed. John’s voice in the morning.
To connect to those moments/people/things we have to first remember that they matter. Then we need to learn to slow down, to pay attention.
Many of us may need to heal a degree of wounding if we feel unlovable or unwanted. And simultaneously learn to like/forgive people— and to stop blaming/ playing victim. That’s its own journey.
I think at the end of life (death), as well as at the beginning of a new one (giving birth) a kind of grace can occur, where we can be struck anew… a spiritual experience, (not of the educational variety ie slow, painstaking work overtime), but whereby something outside of us changes us for the better, seemingly overnight.
Sign me up for that. Because I dont want to miss this.