The quality of a moment

Synchronicity: A Theory of Interactions, part 6

Every moment has a quality. What is the quality of this moment for you?

I'll try and describe it for me. I'm in a liminal, in-between space (I wrote this on the day before leaving for Burning Man). It is very early in the morning. Before sunrise, sitting at my desk, soft lighting, with calm meditative music playing in my headphones. 

The world around me feels very immediate.

This is a moment.

It's very hard to describe ‘the moment." Each moment is experiential.

I invite you to pause right now and notice the quality of the moment for you.

What's really special about this particular moment for me, making it memorable and delicious, is that I feel joyful, relaxed and celebratory. My circumstances yesterday were pretty much the same, and in my head I knew that things are pretty okay for me right now… but I couldn't feel the okayness. I actually felt discomfort, concern, even dread. That was a different moment. 

The positive feelings are accessible to me now in a way that they weren't yesterday. This is the power of experiencing the moment. I woke up this morning refreshed from a dream of a desert sunrise (which I anticipate seeing at Burning Man), and now I'm sitting in the quiet of my own room and feeling mystery and joy that I couldn't feel yesterday.

“I've got to remember this feeling”

Have you ever felt an experience that you couldn't quite describe or catalog, but you just told yourself you had to remember it?

I'm reminded of our wedding in 2003, when our friends and family gathered on a sunny and windy day in Sonoma County, to celebrate our love for each other. I knew I wouldn't quite remember the exquisite tenderness and joy that I felt. We took a lot of pictures, but the actual experience is ineffable. I can still put myself back there a little bit.

After my first time at Burning Man, I knew I wouldn't remember what it felt like to be there. It wasn't simply fun, or exciting, or deep, or connecting, or anything else in particular. It was some combination of feelings that I experienced but couldn't capture. 

I just told myself I had to come back. 

That was in 2007. It took me 15 years to return.

It took me so long partly because I had a baby, and the timing of Burning Man is bad for teachers, students, and parents. 

But another reason it took me so long to return was because I couldn't quite remember the experience.

The quality of “the moment” is something to be treasured. We can't fully capture direct experience; there is something self-defining about experiential reality. (Philosophers use the term qualia to describe this. For instance, the taste of an apple, or the color palette of a sunset.)

The transformative power of feeling the moment

Remembering special moments in our lives has the power to change how we feel in a way that simply willing ourselves to change can't do.

For instance, over the weekend I rode my bike to a park near my house overlooking the bay. After sitting for a while, I got up and saw a baseball lying in the dry grass. 

As I picked it up with my right hand, I felt an experience I hadn't had since I was 11 years old: my fingers automatically gripped the seams to throw a curve ball. 

I could feel the simple joy that playing baseball represented for me. 

I felt myself standing on the pitcher’s mound without any existential anxiety,  just an innocent hope that I could get the ball across the plate. 

There was a steep hillside nearby, and I set myself up to pitch the ball. My hands went up in the air in a circle, and then down to my chest automatically. My head turned to the left to look towards the hillside (i.e. home plate). My body extended and my arm went overhead with the ball. The ball flew through the air, bounced off the hillside, and rolled back to my feet. I felt a rush of energy in my body. I was back in Little League!

For the past year I've been doing therapeutic work on the tension in my right arm. I'd done a lot of different approaches, but synchronicity brought me to this baseball, and suddenly my arm was relaxed. I felt like I had control of my hand again.

Change happens in the immediacy of the moment

Touching into our felt memories of the past gives us access to other versions of ourselves, versions from the past that we have forgotten. It's so powerful. We need to be cautious, to make sure we want to remember each experience. If the timing is right, dropping into the immediacy of the moment like this, where everything else drops away, can lead to significant and lasting shifts in our awareness.

This is why filters are such a powerful tool for self change. Many of the events that happen to us each day are neutral, like white light. But we interpret the things people say or do around us to mean whatever they mean to us, discarding all the various colors except the one we're attuned to.

Yet if I can see my particular filter in action, I can start to imagine a world without the filter. For instance, after throwing the ball a while I still didn't want to leave. I wanted to get as much healing from the experience as possible, but I did have to get back home, and I had trouble making up my mind. 

At that moment, I was looking through the lens of “I need to do more." You can bet that this is a pattern all over my life, even now as I write. 

I’ll pause (with that filter in mind.)

Every interaction becomes a synchronicity to help me transcend my filter.

Welcome to a Leap to Wholeness

We are starting a new series of social media posts around my second book, Leap to Wholeness, How the World is Programmed to Help Us Grow, Heal, and Adapt. One of the big themes in the book is identifying the filters that color the way we look at the world and ourselves. When we can identify a filter or belief we have, without trying to change it, we naturally start to see it better and it's easier to see beyond it. I offer this as a way of healing our old patterns of behavior.