I will offer a few moments from my own life.
Walking on the beach at Myrtle Beach at sunset.
Laying in a meadow with my kids in Yellowstone, after a long hike.
Sitting in a very old stone building in Lucerne Switzerland, alone, after volunteering to help oversee for a time an Amnesty International exhibit. No one came while I was there. It was cold in there, and they brought me some mulled wine, “Gluehwein”, as they called it. It was quiet. It felt good.
You can’t force good moments, and they can and I think often do happen interspersed with moments of stress and tension.
I took my kids to New York some years ago, and by far my favorite moment was when I misread the subway lines and took us to the middle of Harlem, when I was trying to get to Columbia (which my oldest was considering applying to at the time). We got off, and then got caught immediately in a bad rainstorm. We stood under some construction awning with a bunch of locals for a good twenty minutes, watching the rain and each other. It was wonderful.
Then one of my kids had to use the restroom. We talked some folks at a Hispanic grocery into letting us use their bathroom downstairs. I tried some of my Spanish, and it was so comically bad both of my kids laughed at me. I bought us all umbrellas, and we walked up the stairs to Morningside Heights, I think it is called. The rain was flowing in massive streams down the steps. I took my kids pictures standing there in the middle of it, grinning ear to ear. It’s one of my favorite pictures of them.
These are the sorts of things that make up lives, what you remember, what matters. You won’t remember meeting that deadline on your death bed. The bonus was spent long ago, and you won’t remember what you spent it on. But you will probably remember how your child or wife or, if you have a happy family, your mother, smiled when you did something genuinely thoughtful.
You can’t reach for “moments”. You can take a picture and post it on Instagram, but Instagram is the only place it will be remembered.
Without sharing details, my youngest recently went to New York and had a couple really Instagrammable moments, really picture worthy moments, and she was like, nah, I’ll just leave it. That made me proud.
If you don’t take a picture, that won’t necessarily make it more memorable, but if you feel the need to DOCUMENT it, I almost guarantee what feeling was there will dissipate instantly. And the preemptive urge for documentation will leave you needing your Instagram feed on your death bed to remember your life.
No, let things happen. I think learning deep relaxation , and the HABIT of entering into Moments, of feeling the clouds, the sun or rain on your skin, the scent of flowers, or dead leaves and flowing or frozen water, and the emotions in your belly, and heart, and face: all of this makes “moments” more likely. Enlightenment is perhaps feeling little else, despite what happens to you.