February 1, 2012

• That Moment

    

  That Moment   A respected member of Parliament sits agitated and endures a long speech from the opposition party….. An icon of the fashion world prepares for the world showing of her latest designs in Paris…. A longshoreman sits back on a New York dock and takes a smoke, while the next freighter ties up to the pier…. An exhausted Arabian prince waits for his private jet to be refueled…. An Iowa farmer finishes a long week bringing in his corn crop before the rain comes in…. A tired and overworked waitress in Germany pushes on to her 14th hour working tables during the Oktoberfest…. The CEO of a manufacturing conglomerate rides his golf cart towards the 18th hole before calling it a day and joining his business partners for a drink…. A high school coach finishes up his time tested speech on courage and commitment to his teenage football team…. A grandma in Spain puts her infant ‘nieto’ to bed…. A wise and venerated monk smiles as he scolds a novice disciple….   All these people are dimensions apart in both place, philosophy, life style, history and creed. They are as different as the multitudes of celestial stars that twink and sputter over them all. No two are alike in any manner what-so-ever….except, for a particular event that will unite them all. More of a moment than an event. A moment that will deglaze all facets of their lives and leave them totally alone with only the ‘moment.’ In that moment, they will all be bonded together in an exclusive unity understood by few but experienced by most in the thread of life. That ‘moment’ will be the touch of mortality. It will be the stab of the first pain. That instance, when your chest becomes the focus of your entire existence. Nothing will comfort or assure you. The pain will remove you from the mental moment and at first it will surprise you and as the pain intensifies, it will scare you. You will try to reason with your superior intellect, but you will fail. You fall to your knees and try to think of your loved ones, where’s the phone and even denial. Time will be divided into seconds and those seconds into partial segments….each slowly passing as the pain intensifies. You’re weak, sweating, panting and even crying. You wait to die. You wake up in the hospital and your mind is useless. You can’t focus a thought and sounds run together. In time, you start to recognize someone next to you and you know they’re crying and it confuses you even more. Then you sleep. For a long time now, I have wanted to make some kind of attempt to describe a heart attack and each time I run it through my mind it varies in the vision of it and the intensities. Those few seconds become a major chapter in your life and in most cases it will dominate most all the others that construct your life. Days later, when the smoke clears and you realize you’re still alive, somehow you feel fragile and even violated. You now exist with a perpetual fear of every heartburn and sore chest muscle. You slow down and all those around you become your keepers, whether you like it or not. The epilog to all this is strange and I guess self defeating to some. It seems that when you survive an event, such as this…..you end up with an epiphany. You now know that you are venerable and breakable. You now hold your family closer, eat better, buy a dog and love your wife like she’s the hottest thing since Marilyn Monroe. And….there is one last thing you now do….you patiently wait for the next moment.

   

  • 12:30 pm
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