Do you ever take a moment to stop and think about life?
We spend so much time focusing on the bigger picture that we forget to pay attention to the details. Until something so simple yet so powerful strikes us and makes us stop and take a look around.
It might be the colour of the sky, just before the sun sinks away for the night. Or a smile from the person we love most. Maybe it’s a photo on Facebook of someone helping out a stranger for no reason other than the sheer humanity of it.
In those moments we aren’t worried about our careers, or paying bills, or whether it’s time to get the car serviced. We look up and realise the world around us is a beautiful thing. We experience a rush of happiness.
We know that life is good.
So why do we spend so much of it wishing for something better?
We spend our adolescence yearning for the time when we can grow up, leave school and do whatever we want.
We talk about that precious moment when our life will finally begin: whether it’s the day we start working, or buy a house, or get married.
But we forget that life is all the moments that we sleepwalk through, on our way to something more. It’s the time we spend stuck in traffic, groaning and wishing we were anywhere else. It’s the time spent at the office, or waiting in line, or trawling round the supermarket each week wondering why we can’t find our usual brand of cereal.
Life doesn’t have to be all about the big moments. Sure, they’re spectacular when they appear, but we shouldn’t neglect the quiet times. For every holiday, every adventure, there are a thousand nights spent at home on the sofa, watching television beside the person we love.
Those nights may be forgettable; they may merge into one another. But add them together and they make up something more: they make a life.
We live for the great times, for the holidays, the weekends.
But the special moments are all around us, if we only take the time to see them.