I was sitting in bar room lecture series on Tuesday evening when a movie quote smacked me in the face.
It was from About Time - a movie about a father and son who can travel back in time. In the scene, the father tells his son the secret to happiness:
“Here’s the secret to happiness. Go about and live each day normally - the stresses, the immediate reactions, etc. The first time with all the tensions and worries that stop us from noticing how sweet the world can be. And at the end of the day, go back in time and re-live it. But this time, noticing. Deliberately take notice of the little things. Enjoy them. Enjoy the good & bad. Enjoy the beauty of the day.”
I can’t travel back in time. Neither can you.
But most of us live our lives as if we’re stuck in the first "stressful" pass, completely ignoring the fact that the scene we’re standing in is a statistical impossibility. We treat the little things like filler. The commute is a hurdle to get over.
But if you look at the person sitting next to you on the train, the odds of you two existing in the same 4-foot radius at this exact second of human history is basically zero. It’s a miracle disguised as a Tuesday.
We’re all traveling through time together; we can’t slow it down. But, we can live each day as if we’ve deliberately come back to enjoy it. As if it is the final day of our extraordinary, ordinary life.
To look around. To see the greatness in the big, the small, the mundane. To notice the beauty of strangers and their interactions. To remind ourselves that everything we see is only here for this moment.
It’s a marvel that we get to see this view. If we want to flourish, we need just give ourselves permission to relish in the little things.
- L
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