Congratulations

Congratulations. Well done. You did it. You got this far. No don’t look back! Don’t swivel and crane your neck to rework the bits you’ve already done. Plenty of time for all that. Now, right this minute: be here, in this bit, and look at the sky, and be you for a minute. 

Oh for heaven’s sake, don’t look forward. Don’t second-guess the possibilities. Don’t try to peek at the answers. There’s time for that. But not now. Now: be here. In this moment. Don’t worry. You don’t have to do yoga or listen to your breath or imagine the sea or think of three things you are thankful for. Just think for a second about this moment.

Recently, I was flying (in an aeroplane, you understand). I had an incredible view out the window, on a clear day, and I saw beaches and fields and forests and mountains and cars driving from here to there and animals in fields and, below us in the sea, creatures flipping and drifting in the ocean. Boats zipping about. The shadow of the plane passing over the people fishing off the rocks. So many things happening in each moment that passed that it was hard to know where to look. Not only that, but I was sitting next to someone, and behind someone who was talking to someone else, and there were announcements and children squealing and parents shooshing and people asking me if I wanted a cup of tea, and I wasn’t doing anything at all but I realised I felt slightly busy trying to focus on all the things that were happening at once. And I realised: all moments are like this. Full of millions of things. It’s just that we’re always concentrating on our own. This is a Public Service Announcement: examine the moment.

At this moment, right now, there is a squid — a giant mass of muscle and flesh that can change colour whenever it wants to — wafting though the ocean. That’s all that’s happening in that squid’s life. It’s using this moment, right now, to slowly waft. Eating and surviving and, when approached by a predator, changing colour like it’s blushing at a school dance only instead of turning red it looks like the seabed, and the predator feels like a fool. That astonishing, boring, slow, amazing thing is happening right now.  

Somewhere, probably in the dark, two people who like each other are, right now, suddenly holding hands. They weren’t holding hands a second ago. Now they’re holding hands. Both of them are thinking we’re holding hands.  

Somewhere, someone is pouring half a cup of milk into a bowl with some raw eggs. The milk is doing that thing that milk does in eggs where those white clouds form and balloon and spread and this person who is about to bake something is smiling slightly while listening to a piece of music you’ve never heard of. Maybe you’d like it.

Right now is the worst moment of someone’s life.

This second right now, a grandparent is balancing a grandchild’s feet on their own, walking them around like a marionette puppet and feeling a kind of love that takes them by surprise.

Right now, someone is noticing the back of a woman’s head. She’s done that brilliant thing some women with ponytails do where they curl a bit of their own hair around the bit where the hair-tie is and it looks like the whole ponytail is held up by a sprig of hair. The person noticing this is thinking huh, aren’t people clever. The woman with the ponytail will never know.  

Right now, someone is driving in a car talking hands-free to someone on the other side of the world and the car is coming around a mountain next to rolling sea but the person on the phone doesn’t notice, for they are thousands of miles away, deep in conversation.

Right now, thousands of people are flying through the air in the seated position inside metal boxes for hours on end. Most of them will never know each other. Some of them are looking out the window. Maybe one of them looks down at a car driving around a mountain, the edge of the sea a fingernail’s width from the road, and maybe then someone offers them a cup of tea, and the moment has passed.

Moments pass, but sometimes they’re full of everything. Enjoy the moment. This has been a Public Service Announcement. 

You know the deal. This was in The Big Issue. The Big Issue is excellent. Buy The Big Issue.