Just yesterday, I watched the hauntingly beautiful, heart-stopping and, at times, heart-wrenching film ‘Gravity’ (2013). While the special effects were absolutely brilliant and I found my eyes totally captured by the terrifying grandeur of space, it was the littlest things that ironically left a much deeper impression on me – listening to the radio and driving, just driving; a baby crying; a dog barking; finally finding that sneaky, red shoe which turned out to be under the bed this whole time…
And I think, the universe is so large, so vast, so grand, yet it is those ordinary moments – those moments we often take for granted and end up leaving behind as we rush through life – that are most extraordinary.
It’s not just about ‘living in the moment’; it’s about appreciating every single one of those moments – even the ones that annoy the hell out of you, like that car that keeps honking at you even though it’s red lights and you can’t move; like your little sister yapping on about this amazing game she’s been playing even though you’ve told her to ‘be quiet’ several times already; like that lady in front of you at the checkout register who spends five minutes trying to find her purse and then proceeds to count out every single one of her coins so she can give the right amount to the cashier.
Do you realise that it’s actually these moments that will evolve into the stories we tell to our friends and family? That it’s actually these tiniest and seemingly most insignificant moments that we will end up remembering?
Raymond Carver captures this idea perfectly in the following quote:
I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.
– Raymond Carver
The sound of our heart beating is always here with us, always here every second and every minute of our lives, so familiar and so seemingly banal that we often forget about just how absolutely extraordinary that single heartbeat – that simple human noise – actually is. Does it not beat a little faster at the thought of that special someone? Does it not pound a little louder, drum a little harder? Can you not feel those tiny heartbeats leaping in your fingers and toes, and can you not feel them pulsing down your spine?
Just listen. Hear that?
That is what we’re living for.
Into the Forgotten 