Happy Moment to You

Happy Moment To You

by Jane Tawel

January 1, 2017

I began the new year today at 3:00 am and soon hit the road to take my daughter to the airport to catch a return flight to Virginia.  Under the klieg lights of LAX — rubbing tears into my eyes, giving my daughter a sharp hard hug… or two… all right  maybe it was three… and then heading back into the dark, black but for the blinding headlights behind and oncoming, searing all colors from the landscape and impairing my vision. If I look at my life, bitten off whole, it can often seem like that – lots of dark, black  but for the blinding lights. Blinding lights can hurt.  Blinding lights can frighten.  Blinding lights can keep you awake.  Blinding lights can save. Christmas is a season full of different colored lights –and One Light that was Blinding and yet can save.

 

I began the new year today driving home, listening to what they call an alternative radio station and wishing there were an alternative.  Coldplay’s “Yellow” came on and I thought about how my favorite color used to be yellow and how Coldplay singer guy’s mother died with yellow skin. Things happen in life– to people– and I feel fake at my age liking the color yellow. I wish I could be one of those cheerfully accepting purple -hatted red- dressed old ladies or whatever that was then, but when people ask me I tell them I don’t have a favorite color.  Well, it depends, doesn’t it? Are you talking favorite color for a couch or favorite color for a sweater? Do I need a favorite color for a potato? Or a couch potato? Or  a favorite color for a cleaning rag? What is your favorite color? For a sunset? Or a rainbow? Or your favorite color for understanding? Or for a memory? Or for a hug? Or your favorite color for a moment?

 

I started the new year today driving silently on rain-teared freeways and wishing the stain-teared world a “Happy New Year”.  But what a silly thing to do.  Because there is no such thing as a happy new year. What color the year will be for you or for me or for any one remains to be seen and it might not be one of our happy favorite colors. And yellow can change its meaning from favorite to sad. Every year is guaranteed to be  full of lots of contrasting colors for each of us. In fact, there is no such thing as a new year at all.  There is only this new moment.  I acutely realized that this new morning as in the blink of an eye,  I laid on my horn to wake up some one’s father or sister or child going 90 miles an hour, and to prevent me and Polly Prius being hit and pushed into the semi-truck on my right side.  I just had that single solitary moment in which to live. No more. We all – the someone’s crazy -driving relative, the semi-driver, and I –just had that instantaneous moment. To live. To choose. To breathe. To think. To yell into the dark.  To pray. To thank the Lord. One more moment.  Not one more year.  Never a whole year. Not even a whole week. Not even a whole day. No one has that. We all just have One. More. Moment.

 

I began my new year with just one more moment to get home and text my daughter waiting in the airport for her one more moment. I texted, “I’m home. Praying for you. I love you.”

 

In this new moment, as I sit and type, my husband and other children are still asleep. In the next minute I plan on getting up and if I do, I’ll pour my second cup of coffee. I am thankful to have this moment to hear The Beloveds still breathing– Still alive in the rooms that contain our now stale Christmas decorations and half -eaten boxes of candy. The Christmas colors and lights surrounding me in this new dawn, remind me of all the happy minutes in the past week. I am so full of sweetly-remembered minutes I want to clutch them tightly to hold onto and never let them go. I want to hoard them like a new box of Crayola crayons and get them out just to look at from time to time. They are all such pretty colored memoried moments.

But some of life’s moments aren’t all that great. Some of life’s moments aren’t pretty colors at all.  In this same moment in this same city my friend sits in the hospital by her daughter. In this moment, while I pour my second cup of coffee, she has one more moment of  blindingly agonizing fear and pain. While my daughter crams her bag in an overhead compartment, my friend’s daughter is crammed full of tubes. The color yellow looks different under my dining room’s glowing lights; yellow seems different under the airplane’s muted lights; yellow feels different under the hospital’s blinding lights. Blinding lights can hurt. Blinding lights can frighten. Blinding lights can keep you awake. Blinding lights can save. I hope and pray in this. one. moment. that the One True Blinding Light will change the colors for my friend and her daughter.

 

I began my new year thinking about all the people in all the world who can’t remember their last happy moment, and all the people who won’t have one more happy minute, let alone a whole Happy New Year.  I began my new year thinking about the cascading waterfall of all the happy minutes of my life. So many moments dancing like rainbow-hued water drops reflecting The Light. Just like a favorite color, I don’t have a favorite moment.  And in this world, strangely, moments need contrasting colors to make sense, don’t they? Otherwise it’s like driving in the dark. Or into a blinding light.

It’s hard to say what color a moment truly is. Like a prism, a life lived out and held up to The Light, in the perspective of Eternity, changes every moment into something new. And each moment becomes its own Infinity Box of Crayola -colored Eternity fulfilled.

 

Right now, only Now, I have this gloriously joyful emerging-colored moment. It could be someone’s idea of a favorite colored moment.  But I am in fact, living in a completely new undiscovered –until- this- very- heartbeat, new moment’s hue.

I shall name my newly discovered color: Enough.

 

And this moment is henceforth called, Enough.  It is enough.  It is meant to be enough. It is Created Enoughness. It is a Universe of Enoughness.

 

I began the new year with just one guarantee– No guarantees. Not for a happy new year, at any rate. Not even a guarantee I’ll live another minute in this world. But right now I could guarantee myself that I can live this eternal moment and it can be deemed Enough. In this moment, I can accept and embrace Enoughness. One whole moment of Enoughness. One moment to breathe deeply. One moment to smile. One moment for a tear drop. For a belly laugh. One moment for a song. For a thought. One moment to see. One moment to listen. One moment to reach out to someone.  One moment to be home. One moment to risk. One moment to explore. One moment to wait. One moment to pray. To ask. To praise. To thank.  One moment to say, “I love you.”

 

And that is more than enough.That is every thing. This moment is a many-hued kaleidoscope of Eternity’s Enoughness. I can guarantee  you — I think it is going to be one of my favorites.

 

Happy New Enoughness to you and yours – in this very moment. Period.