Recently, another author asked me a question about What Matters: We Are the Sum of Small Moments:
After writing the book, did you find yourself looking differently at the small moments in your own life?
My answer was yes, although perhaps not in the way the question might suggest.
One of the things I came to recognize while writing What Matters is that we often don't know which moments will matter while we're living them.
A conversation, a decision, an ordinary experience, or a relationship may seem relatively unimportant at the time. Years later, we may realize how much it shaped us.
But there is more to it than that.
The moment may not change. We do.
I have lived long enough to discover that the meaning of a memory isn't necessarily fixed.
We look back from a different place. We know things we didn't know then. Our circumstances have changed. Our understanding of ourselves has changed.
And so a moment that once seemed to mean one thing can eventually mean something quite different.
Perhaps that is why certain small moments keep returning.
They become anchors.
We remember a conversation from years ago because something happening today makes us hear those words differently. We remember a decision because we can finally see where it led. We think about a person because only much later do we understand what that relationship gave us, or what it cost us.
The event hasn't changed.
Our ability to understand it has.
But why does a particular memory return?
This is the part I continue to wonder about.
Do small moments simply appear in our thoughts?
Or does something happening in the present cause us to go looking for them?
Perhaps we encounter a question we cannot quite answer. Something feels unresolved. A decision needs to be made. A belief we have carried for years no longer fits as comfortably as it once did.
And somewhere in the process, a small moment returns.
Maybe memory is sometimes doing more than reminding us of what happened. Maybe it is helping us reconsider what we think we know.
That interests me because I have long believed that our values and beliefs have a great deal to do with whether we consider our lives successful.
We can accomplish something we set out to do and still discover that the accomplishment doesn't feel right. Success that conflicts with what we genuinely value can leave us surprisingly dissatisfied.
Small moments can expose those conflicts.
Something catches our attention. It makes us think. We follow the thought somewhere. Sometimes it confirms what we already believed. Sometimes it adds another layer to our understanding.
And occasionally it points us in a different direction.
Paying attention without trying to make everything meaningful
Writing What Matters has made me pay more attention to ordinary moments.
Not because every moment is profound. Most aren't.
And I don't think we need to walk through life constantly asking ourselves whether something important is happening.
The interesting part is that we usually don't know.
The conversation we barely noticed may be the one we remember twenty years from now. Something a child says may stay with us long after the larger events of that day have disappeared. A seemingly minor decision may eventually look like a turning point.
Maybe that is part of what makes small moments so powerful.
They don't announce themselves.
Only later, when we look back from somewhere we couldn't have imagined at the time, do some of them finally tell us what they meant.
And even then, their meaning may not be finished.
Perhaps the small moments we remember aren't simply pieces of our past.
Sometimes they are questions the past is still asking us.
