We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. Thorton Wilder
Seconds before he would succumb to anesthesia for his tonsillectomy, my grandson, Griffin, looked intently into his doctor’s eyes and asked, “Could I just have a moment?” A few weeks earlier, he had three baby teeth pulled, and he wore the trauma of this experience like an albatross. Teeth extraction and now surgery? At six years, how much more could a boy take? He just needed a moment.
Oh, I’ve been there in those circumstances when I was desperate for just a moment. Sitting at my desk, waiting to give an assigned speech; crouching in the starting blocks, waiting for the gun to begin the 400 meter run; lying on a hospital bed being prepped for a D & C which would remove any traces of the life I’d hope to carry for nine months; standing in a visitation line, rehearsing what I could possibly say to the bereaved family. Just a brief respite, the chronology of my life stopped and frozen in a single frame, a space in which to breathe. Could I have just a moment? Please.
In her novel, Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult writes:
Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?
As my daughter and I sat with Griffin awaiting his surgery, he pleaded in earnest: Let’s just go home now. We should go home and reschedule this. I’m really scared, so we should go down the blue hallway and leave. For nearly an hour, he talked in hopes of creating a moment of blessed relief, an assurance that–at least for today–he could keep all of his body parts. It was almost more than I could bear. I could feel his mind tumbling, his six-year-old world unraveling, the loose ends of it lying spent on the antiseptic hospital floor. I wasn’t sure if he would remember this for the rest of his life, but I was quite certain that I would.
And yet there are other types of moments. In The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre referred to these types as little diamonds. American author, Catherine Lacey, claims these moments are the ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in. These are the good ones, the keepers. Fleeting as they may be, these are the moments that you store in your treasure chest and take out, like keepsakes, to admire again and again. We live our best lives in the sanctuary of such moments, and they often sustain us through dark and barren times.
Years ago, I read the account of a POW captured and imprisoned by the Viet Cong. For months, he lived in a cage about the size of a large dog kennel. He recalled how one day stretched painfully into another. With no one to talk with and nothing to do, he could only wait for execution–or rescue. He recounted how he spent his days golfing his favorite courses, imagining each hole, living through the moments of each drive and putt. Philanthropist and entrepreneur Alex Haditaghi writes: Life is not made up of minutes, hours, days or years, but of moments. Nothing is permanently perfect. But there are perfect moments. This POW lived in the perfect moments he had experienced, and those he hoped to experience, on golf courses all over the United States. These life-saving moments made the agonizing months of captivity and torture bearable.
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks writes:
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise. [Annie Allen, 1949]
The moments of our lives may be gash or gold. They may wound us deeply or bless us abundantly. We may long for them to delay what we fear and dislike, or we may wish for them to grow exponentially, increasing what we love and admire. Either way, they will not come again. In the Sanctuary of Moments, we have shelves of these moments, gash and gold, which define us.
The uncannily adult request for just a moment will define my grandson, I’m afraid. As he approaches new experiences and events, he will undoubtedly see courses of action play out in his mind. And these will terrify him more often than not. I know this because I, too, have suffered from such an imagination.
These days, however, I find myself pleading for more moments. As American playwright Thorton Wilder writes, I want to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. I am acutely conscious of my treasures, even those heart-wrenching moments when I would give anything to keep Griffin safe within a beautiful bubble like the one in the photo. Inside this bubble, there would be no tonsillectomies or public speaking or break-ups. Inside this bubble, one could string life’s wondrous moments like shiny pearls. But even when I find that I can do little more than hold a trembling boy before his surgery, I am conscious of these moments, too, which are treasures nonetheless.
