The Small Moments in Life

Your life is made up of moments. Every moment builds into the next, creating a series of moments. Each of these moments and the series they create are the foundation of what makes you the person you are. You are a result of the moments you’ve lived. You are the result of the moments you’ve experienced. If it weren’t for those moments, those specific little bits of time, you would be an entirely different person. You reacted to those moments. They helped you grow.

Of course, some of those moments were more influential over your life. A loved one dying, or the birth of someone new. Graduation, a wedding, a birthday, a new job, a first kiss, a break-up. You base part of your life around these moments, so they will have a bigger impact on you. There’s a lot of build-up and preparation that goes into a wedding. People you haven’t seen in years come to celebrate your relationship. Your relationship takes its next step. The same sort of thing could happen with graduation or a birthday, minus the celebrating a relationship part.

Yet there are smaller moments that could have just as important an impact on your life. Things that you do without thinking. You could cross a road you’ve never crossed before and see a mural on a building that you’d never known was there. The mural could inspire you to work on your own art. It could spark some adventure in your life that leads you to travel more. You never know until that moment happens, and for most people, that moment wouldn’t have had the same impact that it had on you.

It's these smaller moments that I want to discuss. It’s these smaller moments that I want to use dissect my own life in my own way. The small things that stuck with me so I could get to the point where I’m now sitting right here, right now, writing these words. How did I become the person I currently am? I know some of the things that led me here, and I’d like to go through a few of them.

Not everything is something I actively did. Not every little moment will be something where I was at school or at work or hanging out with friends. There are things from movies, from books, from podcasts, from the internet that have stuck with me as much as any of those other parts of my life. But I’m going to try and provide a mixture of them here to help you, and myself, get a broader picture of, well… Of me.

A quick note here before I really get into things. I’m obviously not going to be able to include all these small, meaningful moments in one post. That would be a huge task that would probably be enough to fill an entire book. I’m not at the “write a whole book” stage of my life. Even at thirty-three years old, I don’t know if I have the attention span to do all that at once. This is probably the start of an on-again, off-again series about small moments in life.

I want to start with something simple. Something relevant to the post I’m currently writing. There are bigger moments that led here. There was a competition thing in elementary school where you had to choose three things to participate in for a chance at winning a prize. I don’t remember what all that was about, but I decided to give writing a try. That’s a bigger moment. The person on Twitter who told me that I should start a blog. I remember exactly who it was. That was a bigger one, too. Those moments were direct. Those moments were decisions. They weren’t the kind of small I’m going for. Same with the time someone told me that a horror website was looking for a writer to review the bad movies nobody else wanted to review. That was a direct thing where they suggested I go for it and I did and I spent a year or two writing about bad movies for them, until I went back to school and didn’t have the time. I don’t think I ever officially quit that reviewing job and I never officially got fired. We just stopped doing business together. Oh well.

It was because of that reviewing job that I ended up with this small moment, though. I didn’t take the advice that people always give about when you release writing or videos or podcasts. I’m never going to take that advice. I don’t know the number of times I’ve heard “Don’t read the comments.” That’s always said, but I never listen. I look at the comments. Not that I ever get any on my own, personal blogs. That was where I saw someone insulting my use of present and past tense. That was the small moment. That little insult.

They weren’t giving constructive criticism. They weren’t pointing out my poor use of tenses and suggesting ways for me to improve. It was more of a “what’s wrong with this guy?” and “get him out of here” sort of thing. The way I’m writing about this, it might sound like I let it eat me up. It might sound like it still bothers me. It didn’t, and it doesn’t. The comment did, however, spark a change in the way I write.

At that time, I was pumping out post after post. I was only doing first drafts, which was a problem. A first draft is never going to be perfect. Revision will always help improve something, particularly in those early drafts. Maybe not so much when you’re one hundred drafts in and procrastinating from actually releasing something. Now, I’m not saying I do much more than a first draft now. What I write is usually close to what the final product will be. For blog posts, at least. I feel better releasing something truer to what I was thinking in the moment. It feels realer. It feels more me. With fiction, however, I’ll do multiple drafts.

What really changed was my editing. That comment pushed me in the direction of at least reading through what I write to correct minor errors as best I can. Is what I write perfect? Hell no. But I took a step forward in my writing when I started editing my work. Reading through what I wrote and fixing any major issues improved my writing.

That one comment helped me realize that I was losing my enjoyment of writing. Yes, writing had begun as a school project of sorts. Yet, it became more than that. It became a hobby. It became an outlet for my own creativity. You sometimes get stuck in a rut and that one comment showed me that I could evolve. I could change the way I write or the things I write about to better fit with the person I am at any given time. That was a small moment that stuck with me in an important way.

The next small moment, and probably the only other small moment I’ll go over in this post, came from a movie. You might know the movie. You might not. We Bought a Zoo was a Cameron Crowe movie from the early 2010s that featured Matt Damon and Scarlett Johannsen. For most people, it was a completely forgettable movie that they wouldn’t think much of if it was brought up in conversation. I understand that position, though I consider it better than most. I can see how people could forget about it.

The whole idea was that Matt Damon was a widower father who bought a zoo for his family to fix up and run as a fresh start to their lives. It led to a stronger bond with his kids after they lost their mother seven months earlier. It also led the family to move into the next stage of their life, where they could grieve but also grow, instead of only grieving. Cameron Crowe made it resonate for me, but he also made Elizabethtown work for me, and I know most people didn’t like that one at all.

When I think about We Bought a Zoo, I think of one thing over everything else. There was one scene where Benjamin, the father, told his children about the day he met their mother. He walked past a diner and saw her sitting in a window seat. There was a sort of spit take as he realized she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Benjamin could not let her slip away. He went in, confessed his feelings, took his shot, and saw where things went.

That scene was the result of a conversation that Benjamin had with his son earlier in the film. Benjamin showed how the conversation he had with his son had been proven years earlier with the mother, Benjamin’s wife. The dialogue from that earlier scene was “You know… Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just, literally, twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. I promise you, something great will come of it.” Something great did come of it with Benjamin. He got a wife and two children that he loved more than anything. That scene and the dialogue that preceded it. That’s my next small moment.

The little bit of dialogue advice that Benjamin passed along to his son was something that stuck with me more than the overall movie. It taught me not to worry about everything. Don’t be afraid of anything. Be willing to put myself out there. Good things will likely come. It’s a little pep talk that’s always there, itching itself away at the back of my brain.

“Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage” didn’t lead to a big change in the way I did something specific. It wasn’t like that at all. It was a simple little bit of encouragement that sunk its claws into me. It pushed me to try things I hadn’t tried before. It made me a slightly more courageous person. And that’s why it’s one of those little things that probably isn’t important to anybody but me.

Everyone is built from a series of moments. There are the big, defining moments in a person’s life. Some major event that picked them up and moved them in a wholly new direction. Then there are the smaller moments. Ones that had a smaller impact. They still changed the person, but they may not have been life changing. They were just a building block, one of many. A way to help them grow, rather than a way to help them move.

That’s what makes the smaller moments so special. The bigger moments get you to the place you need to be. The smaller moments, these key things that affected you when they might not have affected other people, didn’t lead you to your destination. They grew you into a person who could find that destination. Those smaller moments made you the person you are.