Well wouldn't you know it my piece de resistance written just a few days ago needed to have something added and damn if I didn't get what that something was until I was on my way to work.
I shoulda threw it in there, it was the point I had been trying to make, but didn't. I guess it just escaped my mind.
The point I had been so bent on illustrating was that when I was walking through that Food Lion bopping to the beat of Hey Nineteen, in that moment everything was fine.
Life moves through time, which can be measured in moments. Moments of this, moments of that. We think, when we are facing the worst, that the worst will last forever but it doesn't. It usually doesn't last very long. What we agonize over is what we think we will experience exclusively but it doesn't work that way.
Bad times can certainly seem like forever, but there is always a little good mixed in. In my case, after I exited that Food Lion I still had to deal with being broke, and I did, and though it sucked I got through it. I knew that I had already faced the worst of it, which was the crazy notion I'd had previous to being broke which was that being broke was The End. Could have been, but I didn't choose that. I chose to move past it and in doing so again saw the light.
I enjoyed the good moments, many of those, when they came, and those got me through. Little victories. A little extra cash, gifts of food, time outs watching cheap matinee movies. When bad moments arose they were only temporary.
Equanimity!
Jed Adam- Unsplash.com
Everything, good and bad, is only temporary. Nothing lasts. The fleeting nature of experience is what I saw directly in that Food Lion and from then on I knew I could survive anything because everything has a beginning and an end. Bad times may last for a short while or they may annoyingly linger but eventually they will pass, as will any good times, change being the only constant in life.
When you get some years under your belt, you'll have plenty of memories. The way you experience life is relative to age. To a five year old kid, life is measured in moments because A. A five year old's attention span is nanoseconds long and B. There isn't a lot of memory built up.
As that child ages, memories will accrue and time can start to weigh heavy on the mind. Heavier and heavier the weight of experience gets, so much so that by the time old age occurs there are enough memories to fixate an adult's attention span for days on end. Doesn't need to be that way, doesn't need to be that way at all.
As the Buddhists say "No mind, no problem!" Thoughts and thinking create states of being and many of those states don't need to be experienced (or re-experienced). It's your choice. Stay responsible like an adult, by all means, while keeping the lightness of being a five year old enjoys.
Be aware that whatever you are experiencing is only a brief moment in the endless river of time. Nothing can be seen as being overly important when viewed in that way.