The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things.…hey.…the good things don’t always soften the bad things; but vice-versa the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant.
During our entire life from the first moment in your mothers arms and the final time your loved ones say their goodbyes to you, our life is a slow build of moments, crossroads and events that individually bring us joy and sadness. They may go into our past being supplanted by new moments but never forgotten.
I hate nuts in my desserts. It’s just stuff with bits in, I love nuts by themselves but I won’t eat desserts with nuts in them. This is a microcosm of the items that make up your life making you alive. Both make me happy but together I’m not quite as happy.
Memories and Moments Last Forever
We are a collection of moments and memories but what are those moments and how do we weave them into the tapestry of our life. To me they are the affect of living your life, creating footprints in the lives of others, experiencing the world around you, helping others, teaching others and generally being the best person you can be.
Collecting Moments
You’re born into this world a blank slate but in that brief second you have acquired the first moment making up the beginning of a lifetime of collected moments. You grow, take your first food, begin to crawl, start walking, your hair starts growing in, you learn to love your parents, family and close friends. Not things you will necessarily remember when you grow up but all these moments have joined with others to make you who you will be.
Each moment is saved, cherished and are used as building blocks to who you have been and who you will become, woven like a fine tapestry in your mind. Each set of moments can be broken down into the several points that make up your life with each set showing how you transitioned from your youth to young adult and the other stages of your lifetime.
From day one you are told to make memories, good ones especially but remember even the bad ones help make your life a fuller one. We collect these moments on our cell phones, in personal journals and in our lifetime of memories in our mind.
Our Youth
You’ve survived your early childhood, the shock of the birth moment to your tumultuous adolescence. Our moments are built upon learning to interact with others, dressing ourselves, becoming less dependent on our parents, and generally take in the data to make us productive human beings. We learn to build relationships but not the nuances of maintaining them. Few of our friendships will last going forward in our lives because the moments we are building here are still not complete.
We think we know everything during these times but they are the most formative of our lives. Most of our morals and emotional values have been set, we can get around on our own, we have graduated high school and we have left our carefree life for a world were we are expected to act responsibility in the world we live. The training wheels are off and our parents can’t really protect us from the dumb things we did in the past. Its off to our trade or college to start our next stage of life.
Early Adulthood
You have left your childhood behind, maybe even family for a short while as you head off to school or your chosen profession. While in college they take those starting moments and build upon them with further education and schooling. Your smaller pool of friends living in a your enclosed base, where you shared the values of your community, families, high school has broadened out to encompass your state, country and a myriad of new friends from around the country and world.
If you decided to forego school and get a job your world has also been changed. The new moments building on your old ones are also new and will form the foundations for many years to come. You begin to understand all the things your parents did for you, food, rent, gas, heat and electricity are now thoughts that form new moments of learning. You remember why your parents spent so much time working to make your life simpler. Your moments revolve around your work friends, you begin to see the world as a place where you have to work to survive.
New moments interspersed with all the moments of your broader environment reshape your thoughts, Friday night at the football game and Saturday at the school dance are replaced with meeting with friends and discussing politics, world events or a rally to show support for some new cause that has been shown to you based on your new moments.
But are we done here, we finish school or start climbing up a ladder to build a career. Relationships you build now will stay with you continuing to build your life. Some of these moments will turn into lifetime loves and the first steps of a permanent relationship with a significant other. You’re world shifts a bit here, you and that significant other begin creating moments that you share. Your friends become our friends expanding your access to new moments.
Early Middle Age
You are looking for some permanence here. You and your significant other may or may not have come together to create a family, a future, raise children, advance your career, buy a home or one of a million other things that shape your life to come. A great number of moments you really weren’t looking for or expecting in you previous days.
Where you had to only worry about the moments that would shape your future, you are now tasked with shaping the moments of your children, mentoring others at work, possibly shaping the view of other children (coaching, your children’s friends or religious communities to show a few). You have your bubble where you exist but that bubble touches so many other bubbles where your moments and their moments merge, to shape everyones moments.
You do find that your life with your significant other begins to change the pressure of raising the family, keeping them safe, preparing them for their tomorrows, expanding your career and paying the bills all have limiting factors. Your shared moments with your significant other become changed by the new moments with the children, you move a bit away from shared friends and concentrate on other things. You become different people, still bound by the previous shared moments that forever link you as we mentioned the moments of our lives never leave us. Love is harder but if you work at it you can form the new moments that will keep you linked in the next phase of life.
Late Middle Age
Your children are grown, they are somewhat self supportive and creating their new moments outside of yours. Hopefully your relationship with your significant other has formed enough critical moments and your lives continue on with each other but in many cases you have not had enough worthy moments and you split from each other.
Staying linked or splitting apart in this section of our lives we fight to stay in our children’s life and finding a relationship that can allow us to enjoy the rest of our lives.
If you are still together this section of your life is spent getting to know the person you fell in love with. We all change less hair, little pudgy around the middle, less passionate about some cause and more involved with a hobby you developed. Hopefully those shared moments will hold us as we review our moments and shared moments to understand ourselves and our significant other.
In either case being separated or staying as one your goal is usually to find someone who’s moments work well with yours and you can build a life of new moments together. You say, if I stayed together how is my goal share my moments with someone new? The moments of your previous life have reshaped both of you, you are new people to get to learn about.
You will also probably find that old friends will drift back in, bringing the moments they acquired while raising their children. Your life fills out and becomes more rewarding and maybe a bit simpler.
Late Adulthood
These are the moments you have aimed for your entire life, you have built a forever relationship, children are part of the world, they’ve built a career and you may or may not have grandchildren. Your life has slowed down enough where you just want to kick back and enjoy your myriad moments until your end of days.
Believe it or not though you are doing capturing moments. The grandkids and your own children bring their moments with them joining with all your moments. You spend time sharing those moments written, as photos or just from memory with them so they can gain from those moments. Your life is no longer shaped by a giant global sphere but is compacted to family and best friends who gain from your moments.
In Closing
Think of our lives as a real world model of an atomic sub-universe. We sit at the center like a nucleus holding the moments of our life in our orbit like electrons. As we move through the stages of living our direct lives grow and change, adding new electrons to form a new elements. As we move through this universe of moments we bump into the nuclear bubbles of other and we share moments, sometimes in a close orbit or at a distance, once more reshaping the element that we become.
In some cases these moments might become vague but moving into proximity to others who shared those moments will push these outer moments closer to our nucleus and bringing them to our consciousness.
Even though our lives may seem a collection of random moments we find that our lives are shaped by capturing the moments of others and sharing them. Like the atomic universe the sharing of these moments are no coincidence and the connections are based on commonalities we didn’t see or notice. Race, creed, religion, politics, hobbies, sexual preference and many other items that on the outside all look different, even feeling insurmountable but by growing your moments and being open minded to all moment can be joined together to make the world and your life a better place.
