Small moments

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments – we hear a word that sticks in our mind – or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly – we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed the mallard ducks in the lagoon…

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we could see certain trends emerge from our collection – certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realise that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real – this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story making events of our lives.


---Douglas Coupland,
Life After God

Furictionary

"OPTION PARALYSIS: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none.

KNEE-JERK IRONY: The tendency to make flippant ironic comments as a reflective matter of course in everyday conversation.

DERISION PREEMPTION: A life-style tactic; the refusal to go out on any sort of emotional limb so as to avoid mockery from peers. Derision Preemption is the main goal of Knee-Jerk Irony."

-Douglas Coupland, Generation X

Parents

"I am reminded that no matter how hard you try, you can never be more than twelve years old with your parents. Parents earnestly try not to inflame, but their comments contain no scale and a strange focus. Discussing your private life with parents is like misguidedly looking at a zit in a car's rearview mirror and being convinced, in the absence of contrast or context, that you have developed combined heat rash and skin cancer."
Douglas Coupland, Generation X

those were the days..

"I believe that you've had most of your important memories by the time you're thirty. After that, memory becomes water overflowing into an already full cup. New experiences just don't register in the same way or with the same impact. I could be shooting heroin with the Princess of Wales, naked in a crashing jet, and the experience still couldn't compare to the time the cops chased us after we threw the Taylors' patio furniture into their pool in eleventh grade."

Nostalgia

I asked her if she was unhappy; she says it is not a question of happiness. She says she remembers another thing about when she was young – she remembers when the world was full of wonder – when life was a strand of magic moments strung together, a succession of mysteries revealed, leaving her feeling as though she was in a trance. She remembers back when all it took to make her feel like she was a part of the stars was to simply talk about things like death and life and the universe. She doesn’t know how to reclaim that sense of magic anymore.