MOMENTOUS TINY MOMENTS
We tend to undervalue the importance of remembering the ordinary things
There’s a small but pivotal moment in Jay McInerney’s latest novel, Bright, Precious Days (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016): Events have taken a dark turn — there’s no way to say how without giving things away, and I loathe spoilers — and one of the characters has raced to the home of her lover to let him know about it.
He is solicitous, taking her in his arms and saying, “Tell me exactly what happened, my love.” He sits beside her and mutes the volume on the television, although he leaves the set on so that the banners crawling along the bottom of the screen are visible: It’s 2008, the time of the Wall St. meltdown. As she starts to talk, he glances at the TV screen. She sees.
“And later,” McInerney writes, “she would realize that was the moment he lost her.”
A great deal is decided in moments like that one, I believe. They are moments invisible to most. But they show a person’s true character. Through what is said or unsaid, done or not done, you know. I have been on the verge of truly bad decisions about the place to accord people in my life and saved, mercifully, when the most seemingly insignificant statements or actions revealed something wanting in their demeanour or their conviction. On the other hand, each time I come out of the house on a snowy winter morning and see that my beloved has brushed the snow from the windshield and roof of my car, I am struck by how profoundly lucky I am to have him in my life.
I really liked Bright, Precious Days, which, with two of McInerney’s earlier novels, Brightness Falls (1992) and The Good Life (2006), makes up a kind of trilogy chronicling the marriage of a Manhattan couple nearly everyone considers charmed. Outward appearances notwithstanding, only two people really know what’s going on between them. The setting, New York City and is environs, is as much a character as the flesh-and-blood ones.
If it was tempting to race through the novel to see how things turned out, I don’t think that’s what the author intended for us, its readers. I savoured the book instead, rationing the pages so I read no more than a couple of chapters at a time. And the book was at its strongest for me in such quiet yet telling moments like the one where the character’s eyes strayed to the TV screen. Did he think he would not be seen? Was he bored? Did he care?
In what was for me one of the novel’s most touching scenes, a couple is heading to a party following the screening of a film for which she’d written the screenplay. It’s only a few blocks, but the wife wants to walk rather than share a cab with others going to the after-party because she wants to savour the time with her husband. “Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two,” McInerney writes. “For now, she wants just to be in between.”
The wife understands that “later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.”
A series of studies at Harvard Business School published in the journal Pyschological Science in 2014 found that we tend to undervalue the importance of remembering the ordinary, even mundane, moments in our lives. And we do it at our peril.
Too often, we waste the time we have, “waiting for those big spectacular moments,” as Shauna Niequist observed in the foreword to The In-Between: Embracing the Tension Between Now and the Next Big Thing (Moody Publishers, 2013), by Jeff Goins. But “the big moments are the tiny moments,” she wrote. “Throw those moments away and you will look back someday, bereft at what you missed, because it’s the good stuff, the best stuff. It’s all there is.”
Some days I feel just awestruck by the intensity of the speed with which the time has passed. I find myself wondering whether I have valued it enough and, on balance, I think the answer is no. I couldn’t truly value something I thought was endless, which is the way I viewed time when I was younger and waiting for the next big thing, whatever that was.
And then, with the small measure of wisdom that sometimes comes with age, you realize that the everydayness of life is as good as it gets — the way the autumn wind makes the leaves dance and sway, being warm under the covers at night, sharing the day’s events at the kitchen table with your husband and loving his smiling eyes — and that this has always been true.
Throw those moments away and you will look back someday, bereft at what you missed, because it’s the good stuff, the best stuff.