Strange things happen when one is in motion. The body relaxes, the mind opens up. The organism loves experiencing its own movement, identifies itself with its kinetic potential. There is life in movement; there is living in movement.
Weeks ago, I was riding a train from Bucharest to Constanta. I’d gone to Poland to visit a good friend, and now rested my forehead against the cold window, the quick trip leaving far too little energy for anything but absent-minded gazing through the glass, and saw a valley full of trees. Too few to make a proper forest, nevertheless the trees agglomerated, gathering into a sort of wall or fence, as though preservers of something special.
This was my first thought upon seeing the scene.
My second was: I gotta capture this.
I fumbled for my phone. Too slowly. By the time I even found it, nestled deep inside my right front pocket instead of on the table where I usually lay it, we’d left the pack of natural warriors far behind.
The loss saddened me. It also got me thinking. About moments. Specifically, missed moments.
The Japanese have this concept called Mono no aware. It translates to the “pathos of things”, or the bittersweet nature of impermanence. I’ve always found it funny how self-explanatory it is, even when you don’t know Japanese. Because what Mono no aware boils down to is being aware. Being present. Loving something not in spite of knowing it will perish, but precisely because of it. Loving something now because it may never come around again.
We live in an age of ownership and individualism. The word “capture”, which I used earlier, carries a huge thematic weight. We are obsessed with putting our names on everything we see. We are like Pokémon masters, trying to catch ‘em all. And when we can’t, we take it as a personal failure.
But often the beauty of something (or someone) resides in exactly this, in us not being able to catch them, in them being too much for our nets to handle. In being left with a scent, a sound, a feeling, or a mental picture.
Because, you see, my sense of loss that day turned out to be unwarranted. Yes, I missed taking its picture, but the place I saw resides within my memory as something almost mythical, a place that exists in a field somewhere, to the right of some railroad tracks, in a completely random place with nothing else to make it interesting except that fateful ring of trees, visible for five seconds during a two-and-a-half-hour journey.
Another thing about moments: they come with an expiration date. It is my firm belief that once a moment has passed, magical or overwhelming or apparently unforgettable as it might be, it cannot be recreated. A picture will not bring what’s passed back from the past.
All this came to me on the long way home, as well as something else: gratitude that my phone was in my pocket and not on the table, screen up, mid-use. That all the years I have cultivated appreciation for beauty, artistic pursuits, and nurturing my inner voice have finally borne fruit. My phone has returned to its originally intended status: that of tool, not second brain, third arm, or heart replacement.
From the archives:
Nothing Matters, So Be Kind - How Everything Everywhere All At Once taught me perspective.
Dancing In A Supermarket - Or how I let anxiety govern me for too long.