Life in the incidental moments

[Originally published on Substack on May 22, 2024. Moving it here as part of building a more complete, unified archive of my work.]

Today, I am working at a table outside of my favorite coffeeshop. It’s a lovely day, with the sun streaming in through the skylights and giant windows of this indoor/outdoor space, with some people walking by but at fairly low volume.

So far this morning, I’ve been working on writing about something that’s been on my mind a lot this year, that I’m still working through how to implement. But that’s a topic for another post.

But there was a micro-moment a few minutes ago that my brain/soul/spirit/whatever wants to call attention to, to remember.

So what happened: I was sitting here working, and an older man with a bouncy walk strolled by and called out to me “I like your office!”

And I chuckled and said, “thank you, me too!”

And we both laughed and moved on. That’s it.

A moment so brief that it seems almost incidental, mundane to even mention it. But what I noticed was that these few seconds of interaction totally shifted my energy, my attitude, made me feel somehow lighter and more alive. Wild that that can come from a few brief seconds from a stranger, isn’t it?

So, this micro-moment is making me notice two things:

1. I want more of this in my life. I want more connection via the micro-moments of being alive. It doesn’t have to be big and meaningful, it doesn’t have to be planned or strategized. It doesn’t have to be with “my” people, and it doesn’t have to come from shared values, opinions, perspectives, interests, etc. Maybe, it doesn’t even have to come from people. What if living is about not what we “do with our lives”, but is instead about these individual tiny moments of engaging with whatever is alive around us? We live in the right now, not in the past or the future, despite what society, culture, expectations tell us; even our own brains trying to make meaning of our place in the world maybe separates us from this knowing that our actual life is happening only right now. And I want there to be more of these kinds of micro-moments, where connection happens by default, to comprise the “right-now’s” of my life.

   
   

2. The other notable thing for me was how impactful this teeny tiny moment was on my attitude and energy as I’m sitting here working. It is a striking reminder to me of how much we can influence the world without even knowing it. This man I’m sure doesn’t have any awareness that his brief comment brightened my day, and yet I’m going to carry positive energy forward because of him. And I think we all do that for each other. Maybe not for every single person we encounter in the day, but our influence in the micro-moments MATTERS. We are shaping the world via the micro-moments of just being ourselves. What would be different if we approach every day with the attitude that the only thing we have to bring to our interactions with those around us is just our presence? That this presence alone is enough to positively shape the world around us. Would that change how we interact? Would it change our experience of others? What if connection and influence is the default, not something we have to work to achieve?

   
   

I am super curious to explore these questions, though it of course requires shedding some of the engrained cultural messages we’ve learned about our “worth” in the world. But maybe asking the question and noticing these things is enough for right now. Enough to move towards bringing more of these things into the micro-moments of life in the world we want to live in.