Momentary Reflections

"So - one year on from Jude's death, what have you learnt?"

Life has an uncanny knack of delivering to each of us the experiences we need if we are to learn what we need to learn. I was expounding this belief to Simon yesterday. That's what prompted him to ask the question above. (An old friend, he's never been inclined to use a nutcracker when a sledgehammer will do.)

I recall the ezine I wrote just after Jude died, headed Do It While You Can. There I noted how grateful I was that we had designed our lives around the things that most mattered to us.

All of that is true. Or at least it's true at the macro level - at the level of how we designed the basic structure of our lives.  But it's only half the story. For life doesn't consist of structures; it consists of moments of time. This is what I think of as the micro level.

Looking back, I see that Jude and I sleep-walked through far too many moments of our life together. We labored under two illusions. The first was that some moments are ordinary. Wrong. It's the "ordinary" moments - time spent together washing dishes or clearing weeds or taking a stroll - that I now miss most.

The second illusion was that moments are an endless commodity: if today's are squandered, more will arise tomorrow, or next week, next year, next decade. Wrong again. It's true what they say: tomorrow may never come.