The Making of a Moment
I’ve written about the healing and inspirational power of my Women Rowing North writing group on the blog before, and what a critical sense of purpose and meaning being a part of these groups brings to my retirement years, to my “elderhood,” to The Precious Days. Helen, a trained Guided Autobiography facilitator, coaxes the ideas and experiences of aging women, by using themes, quotes, and prompts. In turn, we weave them into the written words of our life stories. For our last session, together with these wise women, I explored how showing up in my own life, being attentive to what’s in the moment, remains familiar even as it evolves over time.
I never thought I was much of a “here and now” person. I’m highly distractible and impatient. There are many ways to express those periods of my life I feared I missed or may still be missing — a present moment, a moment in time, a passing moment. So many ways to wonder if I have been showing up in my own life as much as I could.
As I age, I am more concerned with being present for moments. In my younger days, there were times, of course, I gave my entranced attention to the moment — it was a portal to an experience, and I was all in (telling my parents back in the day: “I lost track of time” … “Sorry I forgot to call”…”I didn’t know it was so late.” Sound familiar?).
What follows is my essay recalling a few “moments” as a very young woman. There were those times when, indeed, I lived fully present. I also write a bit about being fully present now in The Precious Days. And I can’t tell you how grateful I am to still have a chance to show up.
It’s a school night in 1972, and I’m sitting on my hard bedroom floor on a pink rag rug, back against the bed frame, pillow stuffed behind me. My 15 year old vibe is full of electric charges and the bedroom is littered with my proof of life: a pile of too-tight tops in anticipation of a weekend party, Led Zeppelin's “Immigrant Song” blasting from the stereo, a bottle of Pepsi, and a menthol cigarette’s curl of smoke in a amber colored glass ashtray. There are Ingenue magazines spread out on the floor next to a jumble of dog-eared textbooks, binders, and blue Bic pens, the pointed tails of their caps chewed to a sinewy thread. The room is redolent of patchouli. It’s time to stub out my cigarette and switch off the stereo. I adjust my pillow and sit cross-legged, lotus style, back straight. I reach for my nearby portable radio and turn on Montreal’s CHOM-FM to tune into a show called “Be Here Now” featuring Baba Ram Dass.
That fall over 50 years ago, I was a teenager alone in my bedroom surrounded by a force of energy, creativity, longing, and pure exhilaration that I was yet to know, in those moments, was not destined to endure daily or even yearly, but would return again and again in different forms. There I sat on a precipice disguised as a hard linoleum floor, experiencing a moment in time tightly wrapped in a universal moment, with the 70’s guru of present moments.
When Ram Dass wrote his book, Be Here Now, in 1971, it quickly became a talisman for the 70’s Boomers. Yoga, meditation, and a spiritual redefining were the counterculture intrigues of a 15 year old living in small town Vermont.
Stacks of record albums on the stereo– always Bob Dylan, along with Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, and even my beloved Toronto-based Edward Bear–were my cultural soundtrack, and piles of floral-covered journals, poetry notebooks, and mass market paperbacks like Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee, I’m Okay, You’re Okay, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull were the intellectual backdrop to so many of these teenage “bedroom moments,” my present moments from the early 70’s.
In subsequent decades the artists and authors would change, but written words and especially music would continue to enhance the kind of moments that would stop me in my tracks as I whispered to myself, “This is so cool. This is just how I imagined my life.” The early 1980’s soundtrack included various British rock bands, Kate Bush, Bob Marley, and Joan Armatrading. And one of those “goosebumps” present moments actually included Joan Armatrading.
It’s a winter night and my friend Helene and I are sitting on folding chairs in Patrick Gym at my former college, waiting for the opening concert act. We surveyed the sparse crowd, when Chris de Burgh, the opening act, took the stage. The only song I knew of his was “Spanish Train.” It would still be years before he would have his biggest hit, “The Lady in Red.” After his opening set, he came and sat a few chairs down from us. I saw him glancing at Helene, which didn’t surprise me. Helene was beautiful, self-assured, and seemed to court fairy dust wherever she went. She had an easy way with people. I nodded to the left so Helene could see who was sitting a few chairs down. Without hesitation, she strolled up to him, said a few words, and pretty soon he was sitting with us. De Burgh moaned a bit about being an opening act to an audience of pretty much “no one.” Geeze, Chris. I noticed as I turned to look away that a lot of people were starting to come in, chairs were being moved, and there was still an opening in front of the stage. I motioned to Helene that we needed to move just as the lights were dimmed and the spotlight hit Joan Armatrading. Oh, that night. So many emotionally expressive songs, Helene and I arm and arm swaying and singing along to our favorite “Willow,” so close to the stage that we could see the Joan Armatrading smiling down at us. What a beautiful, pure moment with my friend.
Several years later, when Chris de Burgh released “The Lady in Red,” a song which always makes me think of Helene, she would be dead from cancer at 29. I have such a grateful heart for the “prayer of absolute attention” I gave to that evening, the feeling of closeness to my dear friend, the magic she cast, and the warm wonder of having shown up, fully present, for a moment that would become a cherished memory.
Throughout the decades there have been “a thousand little daily wonders to marvel at and rejoice in,” to quote Edith Wharton. My Bank Street apartment. Sunday morning snow swirling outside the window, Christian Science Monitor and Sunday New York Times spread all over the kitchen table mixing with muffin crumbs, second and third cups of thick espresso brewed in a beat up Cuban pot. I close my eyes to sink into the memory, and I’m back in the moment, marvelling, rejoicing.
Mindscape travel brings me to yet another moment. Back once again at my old college, this time to hear my guru of the 90’s, Thich Nhat Hanh. I am concentrating hard on the images of Plum Village, willing mindfulness into every cell of my body, as he talks about the ideas contained in the book I hold in my hand, Present Moment Wonderful Moment. Yet suddenly, all I can see are the colors of everyone’s backs in the bleacher rows in front of me: rainbow plaids, furry burgundies, denim blues, hot pinks. Twenty years after my high school bedroom moment, I was again sitting on a precipice disguised as a hard bleacher seat, experiencing a moment in time tightly wrapped in a universal moment, with the 90’s guru of present moments.
“Today’s nostalgia retreats are made up of yesterday’s present moments. ”
It’s a wonder I have held onto any of these moments. Living in the moment and attending to the here and now have always been a colossal struggle for me. But I have come to understand that I’ve been doing a better job than I realized. Now, well into my sixties, I have voluminous pages of memories…memories made of moments in which I was present and attentive. Often, my senses took the lead, and emotion swelled. Today’s nostalgia retreats are made up of yesterday’s present moments.
In my youth, I had my teenage bedroom moments. This morning with my husband, I had a deck moment: one of the first, sunny spring days that was warm enough to have coffee and breakfast outside. I am reminded that no matter how mindful we are of a moment in the present, that moment holds the mind’s DNA of the past and the future. The visceral memory of the past winter’s gray cold, like the coarse grains of a final patch of snow, is brushed away by the spring morning sun. The future of a summer backyard saturated with color and heady fragrance is glimpsed as a chorus of returning migratory songbirds provides the soundtrack. As I appreciate living these present moments of early spring, it’s with an understanding that was lost on me at age 15: these moments will return again and again as memories. This morning, I have time to be present, to remember, to love what is growing as much as what has gone to seed. “Here come the hostas,” my husband intones with a smile. And I whisper to myself, “This is so cool. This is just how I imagined my life.”
“These moments will return again and again as memories.”
