Just occasionally, caught off-guard in a rare moment of calm during a hectic day, I am able to experience life with such clarity that it is almost painful.
I was sitting today with the Very Small Boy. We were in the garden, perched side by side on the back step, laughing together at the slurping sound he was deliberately making as he drank his juice; his big brown eyes filled with delight. I put my arm around him and we looked up at the crisp white sheets on the line, flapping optimistically in the breezy autumn sunshine. The Small Girl and her friend, The Girl Next Door, were laughing and chasing each other through the neighbour’s garden. I smiled at their squeals of delight and closed my eyes, savouring the warm sun on my face as I breathed in the buttery sweetness of baking flapjacks drifting out through the open door behind us.
When I reach the end of my life, it is moments like these, I realised, that I wish to remember. For we all experience the momentous things: life, birth, death, marriage… But what really shapes our lives are the little things that happen in between – beautiful, fleeting moments that catch us off-guard; threatening to slip by, unremembered.
