Other people’s words about … making time count
Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn’t when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at the sunset. Life isn’t waiting at the altar or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. Ten or twelve grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Every day, thousands of tiny events happen and if you’re not watching, if you’re not careful, if you don’t capture them and make them count, you could miss it.
You could miss your whole life.
From ‘Addition’
by Toni Jordan
Many years ago, when I was in my very early twenties, and travelling through Israel, I climbed a mountain with a man I had just met. Perhaps it was more of a hill than a mountain, although in my memory it was a mountain. It was September, and it was hot, and later — perhaps that afternoon, or perhaps the following afternoon (time blurs a little in my memory, here) — we found a small cafe with tables outside, where we sat and drank glasses of mint tea, hot and sweet and syrupy, and we talked. We talked about fear (me) and excitement (him) and the lives that lay ahead of us (both of us), and I thought, in this one, tiny, fragmentary moment of my life, that the world was a strange and wonderful place.
But life, as Toni Jordan so eloquently writes in the passage I’ve quoted above, is more than the sum of such moments. And though I can think of other exhilarating moments in my life like the one I’ve described above, the moments of daily living are, I believe, what truly count.
Somehow, these moments of daily living have to sustain us. Somehow, they have to be enough.
Perhaps, as Jordan suggests, if we take the time to remark upon them, to capture them — even if only for ourselves — they will be.
Daily moments: winter sun, winter shadows
Lately I’ve been reading about …
- … the life of a freelance editor: its joys, its travails, its sorrows.
- … how to take the next step in your life.
twenty-one words 
What a beautiful insight. Thank you for sharing.
Thank you, Grace. I’m glad it resonated with you, too 🙂
I like this quote a lot, it awakens us to the reality of our lives, living largely uncelebrated. Daily journaling could be a way to note and celebrate the ‘ordinariness’ of our days. I’ve done gratitude journals, but this would be different. More reminiscent of the daily jottings of old… “made 6 pints of jam today and 4 quarts of pickles. Mary stopped by…”
I agree, Eliza. I find gratitude journals tiresome, but I do love recording my daily life. It gives me a sense of purpose, somehow, in a way that a gratitude journal feels (to me) somewhat contrived xo