Breathless Moments

Incredible, is it not, that something so fleeting can inspire something so remarkable? Yet this is who we are; people staring out through windows at the lives of other people, imagining ourselves elsewhere, the heroes of our own adventures.

It's sad, wouldn't you say, the way life seems to evolve? One could almost say it devolves. We begin as children, the heroes and action figures of the stories of our lives. We turn backyards into faraway planets, living rooms into battlefields, and our bedrooms into castles and forts. We grow. As teenagers we sink into a state of feeling; everything cuts more sharply, colours blind, emotions are rampant and occasionally toxic. As teenagers, we bare the souls we shall seem to lose as we mature; as teenagers we are the generation who feel that we grew old before our time. We mature. We settle into a pattern of life, and like water which flows along the same path for years, we carve a niche into the world. The world fades from a hub of colour and excitement, where everything can be imagined as something else, to a world where everything is the same, and we ourselves are as indistinguishable from one another as ants are to us.

Sometimes, in those rare moments of pause, when life is not consuming us, we find that we are alive. We stare out the window at the rain or the snow, at the leaves as they turn, or as the traffic as it rushes by, and we are taken aback by the breadth of life. Suddenly, we feel small, tiny, a speck of dust on the planet's surface; but the smaller we feel, the more aware we are, the more alive. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment for us to remember that there is possibility after all, that we are allowed to admire the rain, or surrounding architecture, or the life of someone else, recorded in breathless images across the pages of a book.