A Lifetime of Simple Moments
December is my favourite month of the year. The rains that inevitably come with it feel like therapeutic cleansing for all the emotional grime that had accumulated since January. Today I'm in Cyberjaya, having one of my regular Saturdays, tapping away happily on my laptop, with a pot of Earl Grey brewing away beside me and some Mozart playing softly in the background.
The way human memory works is that we tend to forget typical days like these. We recall the highs and lows of life: special moments of ecstasy or despair, but the rest collapses into a featureless mass of vague impressions, which we associate with the passing of time.
But I make it a point to value these featureless days. When 'nothing' is happening, and all you get are the safe and familiar, it is actually pure bliss. When I think back on my time in Singapore and Jakarta--two cities that I recall with great fondness--the impressions that linger in my mind are formed by the many ordinary days I had spent reading, eating and drinking at favourite cafes and restaurants. It is a strange, blurred-out amalgamation of days experienced, a sort of superimposition, as if each day is a translucent sheet, stacked together, and held up for view against the light.
Taken together, they define 'happiness', as I see it. Happiness that is greatly cherished with heartfelt gratitude. That is how I look forward to the future--to be made of many such uneventful days, but bliss nonetheless. Days of tea and music and writing and thinking, punctuated by insights that come like heavenly revelations.
We live, we love, and then we fight over all the petty little things that we humans, for some inexplicable reason, care about. In the end, they all do not matter. We return to dust, together with all the trivialities and banalities of our brief existence. They did not matter before we were born, and should definitely not matter when we die.
And that is what makes life beautiful; its fleeting sweetness made sweeter by the realisation of its own sweetness. This C minor chord struck in the Mozart sonata I'm listening to, the sip of aromatic Earl Grey on my lips, these words that I tap out on the screen--these are all luscious moments of sweetness, which I appreciate the instant they are experienced. One sweet moment, followed by another to make a life.
A lifetime is nothing more than a sum of simple moments—each luminous, fragile, yet complete. Each sip of tea, each musical chord, each word tapped magically into being is a revelation in itself. To live wisely is simply to hold them up to the light and let their translucence define happiness. What more could we ask for when the sum of such quiet joys already makes a life whole?
