Throughout our lives, certain outsized moments seize us—the first red leaf of fall the year of a divorce. The widow seeing her reflection in the hearse’s black veneer before it drives away.
Those small things take on big significance and give life’s incomprehensible immensity a dazzling order, like the moment—crystalized in my memory after I bundled up my little brother, brought him outside to see his first snow—when he touched his tongue to the frozen air and let a snowflake rest there. I felt beyond my twelve years of age, bigger than a big sister.
You’ve been there too—bigger than yourself in small ways. And when we ponder those kinds of moments, there’s power in them, power to create good art—make a poem, a painting, an aria, a pattern of plies choreographed for the dance. There we lose ourselves in what we gain, too. Those gains outsize us.
Indulge that yearning to capture what’s seemingly fleeting, sublimely clear, and perfectly human while also bigger than any one of us. The experience that has seized you, you can seize in turn: Use it as a guide to your next creation.
This made my heart pound on the walls of my chest, begging me to share the experiences you describe. Thank you for the reminder that I can release those small moments that left such a big impression. I’ve always saved them for later, which hasn’t yet come.