Snow on a Monday

Here I am, sat in my chair, my feet up on the low sill, a gesture that makes me feel a little inch closer to me. I call today "Monday" though I suspect the day is indifferent to the name. It's snowing. Snow globe sized flakes tumble against gravity, resist their fall. I like to imagine each one yearning to be suspended in air for as long as possible before disappearing into the warmer ground. I'd call it romantic if today were a Sunday.

I think about what today (Monday) means in the context of the thing (my life). In other words, the moment. I'm told so much depends on being "in it" but how can one be within a finite point? Maybe I should instead imagine a continuous spectrum of moments rather than single points - the past slipping away into memory and the future a wide open field of possibility - but it doesn't seem real to me. Like wave particle duality, as soon as I look at a moment, it's gone. There it is, already slipping into the varnished past. The future smaller by one unit of whatever it's measured in (probably moments). Past +1, Future -1, and I keep making this calculation in the moment rather than doing something more productive with it.

Sometimes I am fixated on my life as a certain number of moments. I will go through them all, or they will go through me, we will reach the end, the past and future will be even, and I will be dead. Maybe then I'll be in the moment?

Here is my compulsion: to get through the moment in front of me as efficiently as possible. My desire is to finish the master piece all at once, panting, in one magnificent stroke. My desire is to fall as quickly and directly as possible for the sake of getting to the ground - just to disappear. Does happiness lie on the other side of this? Of course not. It's a hollow accomplishment, every time. And I'm starting to wonder at the value of these hollow accomplishments at the expense of happiness.

Take food shopping, for instance. I loathe it. I detest it as time consuming and inefficient (food into the cart, from the cart to the belt, from the belt into bags, bags back into the cart, from the cart into the car, from the car into the house, and FINALLY into the pantry and fridge - AGH). I consider it a "one way only" activity. If we forgot something in aisle 1, too bad. We're not going back. This is how I live my life. These feet were made for marching forward, not for retracing steps back to what I've forgotten, or for wandering, or dancing in circles.

But watching the snow resist its falling has made me think about the beauty in the nonlinear, the value of the moment, and that hope is the moment sustained. Sustained for what? Perhaps for happiness. Perhaps this sustainment, hope, changes the equation and the nature of the time between what was and what will be.

When my past and future do draw even I'm afraid that I will have tried very hard but will have been mostly unhappy. That I will have my hands outstretched for a prize that never existed. That I badly missed the point. That I got it backwards. So I let me start with this moment:

My feet on the sill were important. The snow was real, and Monday wasn't.

There is time enough for everything.

There is time enough for happiness.

The prize is living.