Transforming Moments Together

A transformative moment is not always created intentionally. Many of these transcend words in the moment they are experienced. Living within the power of these experiences sometimes takes us away from the control that is our sense of place in life. Such a sense of control leaves us with stability over our choices and our feelings. However when there is a change in this reality; be it something comforting in our lives that is lost or something new and less familiar, we can either feel the experience or run from it. And sometimes these changes can change how we think and feel about life and can influence what we do purposefully create.

For me, these experiences transform my understanding of life. These experiences doesn't necessarily have to be detrimental in order to provoke change or new understanding. Sometimes they can be held in place while the emotions of the moment run deep and the thoughts and inextricable connection of the universe brings you closer to the whole reality of the wonders of life.

Grasping onto to our realities can help us feel how shifting forces and experiences are a part of our own. When I feel this kind of reality, that of many others' intersecting with my own, I know how small I am, yet how integral this feeling is to my humanity. These kinds of experiences are usually brief, yet last in my heart a lifetime.

I lived on Long Island when the World Trade Center towers were attacked in New York City on September 11, 2001. I wasn't in the city to witness the horror, but I felt the immediate reverberations of fear and concern echo across people everywhere around me. I was aware that many competing forces demanded for the attention of the nation as the area around New York became numb with shock and later changed by grief and outrage. I had seen the World Trade Center towers in person and had walked in the shadow of their magnificent height. To hear of their destruction and the death of many lives continued to alter my understanding of our multiple, complex civilizations that exist and interact across our daily lives and histories. 

As the decade changed course from this pivotal day, so did I. I ended up moving away from the area that was once home and become a part of a new landscape. Western New York was culturally and socially different from the familiar on Long Island. And then almost a decade later, I returned to Long Island and New York City for a weekend. During one stretch of time, I wound up being intrigued by the reality that I hadn't been to downtown Manhattan since the attacks on September 11th. In seeing the setting sun fill the gaping hole that once held the site of many interactions that shaped lives around the world, I stood silent. Changed. The words that could have escaped my mouth were removed by the space of time. 

How interconnected we really are. How these realities of wonder, shock, memory, transformed my sensitivities and thoughts of each person. How fragile we are. How our connections can strengthen through understanding. May this understanding be one where we see how each difference is also our similarity, how each uniqueness also brings together our whole world. May this oneness be unifying, not in fear, but in harmony. Let us know that in loss, we remember how this moment was formed from our connected beings and in that new moment may we stand with courage in remembrance and hope for our moments in this shared world.

Ground Zero in Downtown Manhattan - 2009

Special Olympics statue at the State University of New York College at Brockport

Unspoken Realities

What is unspoken is not necessarily something unheard. What we feel and discover during an interaction or moment with ourselves or with others can still reach through to the heart as it beats out a cadence of what we experience. It then later remains imbedded in memory and feeling when we live and remember. These unspoken realities bring us to deeper places of our selves, of our relationships, connections, and places. What we live and feel in a moment can stay with us a lifetime.

This isn't something that is always good or bad. It is what we make of it now and forever. As meaning and feeling emerge or intersect in time these experiences shape us. These times that are unspoken because they are too deep for words are spoken through expressions and the feelings that fill our eyes. This is how we are changed by our feelings as they fill in the blanks where there is an absence of words.

 First impressions, fleeting glimpses of nature's beauty, nostalgia, evocative creativity, all create these times where we feel with our senses before we feel our souls turning to receive them. What I feel when I smell a fresh pine tree as I walk beneath the boughs covered in sunlight. How the cool air of a summer breeze ventilating a car on a drive along city streets.  Hearing the  echoes across a great hall now empty where memory fills in the people that once danced there.

There are conversations we wish we could return to, people and events that have made us so alive in who we are that we couldn't enjoy life any more fully, and places that trouble us and discourage spirits, anger us at what has been or what could have been. Transformation occurs in these times. Change does happen whether or not we accept it or even notice it.

It has been said that nothing lasts. Nothing lasts except the memories and life that has already been. What is before us now in fondness when we catch a friend's gaze, smile at someone tapping a moment's potential, or briskly walking through daylight that illuminates our way forward. These are the realities where the senses we feel now will guide us back to these moments when we stop to feel them.