Seven Seconds

Nothing seems real.

Beautiful day, today…warm, sunny, gentle breeze…but there’s a vague sense of…

I don’t know. It’s a clear day but the air seems foggy. Maybe it’s just my brain. Maybe it’s more than that. Am I thinking about this too much?

I can hear the kids play during recess at the school behind my house. A few years ago the sound of that laughter was the sound of happy recognition since one of those voices always belonged to one of my children. Now those are the voices of strangers…familiar yet foreign, heartwarming yet heartbreaking. It’s been 5 years since any of my kids have gone to that school. Has it really been that long?

A rabbit runs across my field of vision and I follow it with my eyes. I watch it scamper and hide under the gazebo built by me and my children…a gazebo built to replace the treehouse playset that I built there almost 20 years ago. The treehouse that my now 21-year old daughter, 18-year old and 15-year old sons played in and only a few years ago, helped me tear down.

I think I’m recognizing the fleeting nature of everything, recognizing that the moments that define what we call life are just that…

…moments.

But how long is a moment?

In medieval times a moment was 90 seconds, an hour being 40 moments long.

But if a moment is a long as a thought, then it is about 150 milliseconds long.

My moments are mostly memories now. If that is the case, a moment can be any length of time…from ephemeral to enduring.

I am recovering from surgery. A simple surgery, as far as they go, but complicated by the fact that my heart paused for 7 seconds. It obviously started beating again, without any major intervention or consequence. But … to be technical and overdramatic … I had no heart beat for 7 seconds.

I was “dead” for a moment.

That reality may be why now, reality does not seem real.

Reality is fleeting.

Life is fleeting.

And the moment may come where there are no more moments to come.

There is a friend of mine…more of an acquaintance, really…whose social medial posts and flowery, typically pretentious prose make me snicker and guffaw. But he treats life as a grand adventure, as a fantastic experience – a series of moments if strung together could make a movie of a life of happiness and wonder, amazement and awe. He closes each post with the same borderline naïve and overtly cloying albeit inspirational phrase.

“Never miss a moment.”

If someone sat and watched a movie of my life I wonder what they would see? More importantly, what would that movie look like to me?

There are the obvious givens. The school. The job. The failures. The successes.

But the scenes that stand out in my head are the ones – really the only ones – that matter. These were the moments where my family – and in some instances my future family - was involved or impacted.

And in replaying that movie in my head, it became obvious to me that those moments - be they happy, sad, tragic or comedic - were also lessons…life lessons that, at the risk of repeating a tired cliché … I wish I had known when I was young man.

Those movie scenes – those moments – fade from memory as the years go by, like the fading images on celluloid film.

Although much of my accumulated wisdom lives on in the stories told to my kids and in the manner in which they carry themselves and live their lives, I want them to have something that they can read and pass on to future generations. I want to write down my life experiences and give them something to trigger their own memories more so than to remember me by.

It has to happen before all of it disappears…

…that can happen at a moment’s notice..

…like in seven seconds.