Perfect the Moment. Seize the Day and Perfect It

K. Coomaraswamy in The Dance of Shiva, however, apparently refers to “three hundred and sixty kinds of the fine emotions of the lover’s heart.” I’ll have to read The Dance of Shiva, for the reference to it that included the above quote didn’t elaborate on those kinds of love.

But this article is not so much about love, although love is certainly a necessary ingredient in what I think is enormously important in life: perfecting the moment. More and more nowadays people spread themselves thin in and around their phones and computers, and forget the power of sinking into a moment, deep into the heart of a moment and their own hearts.

More and more these days I feel that I’m tired of the old computer and would rather not look at my phone at all for long stretches of time if I could help it. I feel that life is slowly sliding by and the only remedy is to perfect small moments in order to curve time and get a little bit more out of it than a straight line.

I saw a statement today on Pinterest, where I sometimes dawdle (briefly) in search of inspiration and the pulse of the Zeitgeist, so to speak, and this statement read, “When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you (quote by personal development coach Lolly Daskal).”

We also sometimes forget that our friends can be an enormous source of inspiration, and that a dinner with a friend can lead to incredible rejuvenation of spirit and ideas. I, for one, forget this truth much too often (partly because dinner in town seems like an expense I should forgo as much as possible). Even yesterday, when I met up with my good friend, I thought we would go to the concert and that would be it. I didn’t consider us wining and dining each other afterwards :) And it was wonderful. We were tired and overwhelmed with certain things, but sitting there talking and drinking our wine we felt – to use a cliche – wrapped in comfort and love.

It’s funny how easily we forget how to perfect certain experiences, isn’t it? We either overdo it, by drinking too much, or we forget the value of sharing a nice glass of wine with our friends. Some of us also forget that we need to listen to more music or watch more movies in movie theaters. Or that we have wanted for the longest time to go dancing and kept putting it off until we forgot about it. In my case, because I wanted to lose some weight first and get my body more limber with calesthenics.

We should also seek people whose energies combine with others much like the amplitude of waves going in the same direction. It doesn’t mean that our friends should be similar to us, only that they should be oriented energetically in a way which makes turn our meetings into constructive interference, to use the language of physics.

I, for instance, get in touch every day with an aunt I care a lot about (love dearly, in fact), but our communication, while good, doesn’t jibe. We share so many things, but our words don’t mesh together. On the other hand, I have a friend I email with daily who always resonates with me and whose emails give me a boost of energy as I write her about my day. I also leave our communication feeling good about our combined vibes, and having renewed focus and inspiration for my projects.

We’re bound to have in life all sorts of relationships, not all of them resulting in higher emotional / mental / energetic amplitudes even as they may be nourishing or expanding our reach emotionally / mentally / spiritually, so it’s really important to seek the company of people who make us feel in their presence like a fish gliding through water rather than like one that gasps for air in search of more words to express what we’re going through. Sometimes it’s hard to find these people, but they are there, and they're looking for someone like us too.

And we should seek our friends’ and family’s bodily presence more, too. My interactions with the aunt I’m daily on the phone are quite a different story when I’m in her bodily presence. I never have enough of her when I’m with her that way. It’s true that words are sometimes so ineffectual when it comes to certain kinds of deeper communication.

I’m actually rather worried about this whole trend of falling back on text messages on our phones to keep our relationships alive instead of trying to be there for our friends and family in person. And to think that even email use between friends and family has been declining steadily over the past decade. At least email gave us a chance to write about ourselves and what we feel more extensively; it feels so awkward to write long passages about what we feel on WhatsApp, for instance, that many people keep much of their emotions to themselves in the absence of an in-person meeting.  

And so it is that life goes on and we don’t really share much of it with our friends and family.

So here’s to some mulled wine, heart-to-heart conversations, and uplifting cheer this holiday season!