IN THE MOMENT

Oh, what a feeling, 

that feeling of intra-expansion, 

the swelling of your chest 

with a huge draught of air,

the deeply satisfying sigh of your lungs,

that accompanies the wellspring of your spirit 

at the moment something clicks together

like the seat belt on your flight,

and suddenly you understand. You get it.

In that moment you know you know 

what has been here right in front of you all along.

Like a child playing hide and seek with you,

it giddily, if impatiently, has waited for you to discover it, 

hoping, knowing that eventually you will come. 

And in that twinkling of your inner eye you realize 

life is not found in reaching some destination, 

though such arrivals are sweet as ice cream,

if not tart as the apple pie of the journey itself;

but in the moment of the moments along the way. 

Life comes to life in those brief but spectacular 

flashes of deep inner knowing when,

in the instant, you find yourself streaking ahead,

not of billions of others running the race,

but of the race itself. 

We don’t need such moments 

of lightning-strike clarity often, 

but without them our spirits cannot survive, 

and worse, we can know nothing 

of what it means to truly thrive.