Once I read a novel that revolved around a 17-year-old boy. In the story, he’s a rather anxious young man, having suffered a traumatic mugging and then discovering his father in the arms of a woman who wasn’t his mother.
His parents are divorcing, and he’s been sent to live in a mountain wilderness where he’s cautioned not to leave the house without bear spray to defend himself against grizzlies.
In one minor passage of the book, he wakes to find himself inside “the perfect moment.” It’s a fleeting instant of time where no shadows from the past lurk and no fears of the future intrude.
He loves that moment and wants to extend it, but he’s thrust into his immediate circumstances before he can succeed.
When I read that passage, I immediately identified with the feeling of his “perfect moment.” You’ve probably had a few of them yourself. Maybe many. Maybe often. Maybe even now.
Capturing the perfect moment is hardly the young man’s main concern in the story. But I thought I’d share a way that you can expand your own “perfect moments” when you notice that you’re experiencing one.
Noticing one is the first step. And the way to do that is to remind yourself that you’re going to watch for them. You can set an intention at the beginning of your day, for example, or put a loose rubber band on your wrist to remind you to catch them when they occur. Invent your own reminder. You know what works for you.
The second step is developing a sense of how the perfect moment feels. It’s holds feelings of deep contentment, of total acceptance of everything the moment holds exactly the way it is.
It’s empty of concern for anything in the past or future. It’s a moment of wakefulness, where your senses feel alive and where sensing is pleasant and vivid. It’s being fully present in this very instant of now.
As the young man in the novel noticed, perfect moments can be fleeting. Distractions enter the scene.
And a distraction can make it disappear. But it doesn’t have to. (Unless, of course, you’re facing a grizzly bear.) Instead of letting the distraction pull you out of your perfect moment, welcome it into the moment and let it be a part of the perfection, too.
Because the perfect moment is generated by the heart, not by the head.
In fact, the more that you cultivate feelings of welcoming acceptance, appreciation and wonder, the more often perfect moments are likely to occur. And the more fully you feel these warm feelings from your heart, the more willing your brain will be to relax and allow you to bathe in them.
The fact is, your brain likes this state as much as your heart does. It’s called “coherence,” and it allows you to function at an optimal level.
If you have challenging mental work to do, being in coherence allows you to do it in the “flow” state, where concentration comes with ease and time seems to disappear.
If you’re doing a casual activity, coherence will allow you to do it with a sense of heightened pleasure in all that your senses are bringing you.
There are volumes of studies about all sorts of health benefits, too. But the main benefit, in my view, is the expanded joy that living inside perfect moments brings to life.
I wish you heightened awareness of them and happy practice in expanding them to fill more and more of the moments in your life.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by mooremeditation from Pixabay