This vacation has been good for me. I'm sitting here
tonight at a friend's computer, long after the friend
has gone to bed, pondering the changes brought about
by "small moments" during this particular vacation.
I would count as such "small moments" the times I
realized that I didn't know it all, and realized that,
blessedly, I was still capable of learning new things.
Interestingly, the moments that caused such realizations,
at least subjectively, have all been "small," in the
sense that they would create no blips on anyone's radar.
They just happened, and I happened to be in a place
where I could appreciate them happening. Moments like:
* Watching a seven-month-old girl go completely through
the learning-to-crawl thang, start to finish. Awesome.
* Finding a wine at the local Super U market and being
incapable of passing it by because of its name ("Very
Limoux"), buying a couple of bottles for 6 Euros and
change, and discovering that it was a wine one could
describe as memorable, almost epic. And then discovering,
after the fact, that it won a gold medal in Paris in
2007, and that I am far from alone in my appreciation.
* Discovering anew that the product that has delivered
by far the highest ROI (Return On Investment) for me in
this lifetime is now officially my 20-year-old pair of
Vasques hiking boots. These boots somehow enable me to
walk forever, without fatigue, and have since the day I
bought them.
* Real food and water. Most of the food I have eaten
since I've been here has been picked from the garden of
the house I am staying in. The water I"ve drunk comes
from the tap, and the well. Both exceed anything I have
associated with the words "food" and "water" in recent
years. Mmmmmmm.
* Families. Possibly because I am vacationing with one,
I have been reminded on this Road Trip of the magic of
the "family unit." I am vacationing with a unit that is
oddly composed of two wives, one husband, one young (and
very lovely) daughter, two cats (theirs), two dogs (mine),
myself, and a couple of ladyfriends of mine who have
visited when they could get away from work. It's made me
appreciate the wonderful variety of, and the unvarying
magic of, the other families we've run into.
* Meditating in a thought-free environment. That's been
a veritable "small moment" in itself, living in an area
in which if I close my eyes I just "go away" into deep
and profound Silence. It's been reminding me how close
I must be to going away altogether all the time if all
that I require to remember the Silence is to close my
eyes. And often not even that.
* Reading Fairfield Life selectively. Ever since my own
computer's screen died, I've been having to borrow one
of my friends' computers to check in here. As a result,
not wanting to hog bandwidth from nerds who seem more
in need of it than I have been, I've been limiting my
FFL-reading sessions to scanning the Message List and
determining who and what I want to bother with and then
restricting myself to reading only those posts. As a
result, FFL now requires less than ten minutes of my
day. And if that's not a positive sign, I don't know
what is... :-)
