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Finding Meaning in Despair —How to live through Impossible Moments.
It’s 8 AM, and the next meeting is in a few minutes. It’s 11:00, time for coffee. This weekend, we have a hike planned. Maybe next year, he’ll propose. I think we’re ready for a baby.
When meticulously planned moments pass from one to another like clockwork, it is easy to forget about how stagnant life is. The next distraction is only a clock-hand-swing away, so we can just pretend like now doesn’t exist. Or drown it in a cup of coffee, and the computer screen.
But now and then, when all that comes crashing down, Life stands still. You begin noticing how the walls on sidewalk have blackened, How familiar the street in front of your home looks, You find comfort in the familiarity of how light falls from the window, just like it did when you were 5. But at a different time, at a different place, with different people. It feels unreal that you lived through the time between then and now, and the next step seems mysterious. You will most certainly believe that it will never come. In that fix, there is nowhere to go but to stay where you are, and revel or suffer the moment.
In that calm and stillness of such times, you can choose comfort or long to leave it for the next moment. If you choose comfort, that is when you will see, that life doesn’t end at that bend.
