500 Words a Week - The Power of Small Moments

One of my favourite thoughts/ lessons I learned this year was from when Sam Harris was on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom Podcast. In the episode, Sam was talking about how he was rushing around his house getting ready to leave for the podcast. He was under time pressure, so he was grabbing what he needed and heading out. Yet just as he was at the door, ready to leave, he stops. He goes back inside the house and embraces his wife. Giving her a hug and a kiss before then leaving the house.

I think we can all find ourselves like Sam at times, frantically running around, consumed by what’s happening in our life that we forget how the others around us are or what’s going on in theirs. Sam was in a rush to get out of the house, yet when we are in a rush what’s really the difference in spending 30 seconds affirming our love for someone close to us.

I think we falsely believe that life is all about the big and grand moments. Moving city, starting a new job, buying a house, getting married, going on big holidays. These are all significant life events, but each of these happen infrequently. We can’t look to place all our happiness on aspects of our life that happen maybe only once throughout the course of our life. The more we think about it, life is a summation of the small experiences that we go through every day. That we tend to take for granted. That we assume we will always have. None of this is guaranteed, and if we continually take these small moments for granted, they may not always be around.

How often when passing someone we kind of know do we nonchalantly say “Hi, How are you?”. Then we’ve more often than not passed the person in our commute before actually hearing their answer. How long does it really take for us to stop, ask and listen. I argue maybe 1-2 minutes. Take for instance Sam’s story from above. How long did it take for him to go and give his wife a hug and a kiss before leaving? 30s, at a max 1 minute depending on how frisky they were feeling? It’s a summation of these 1-2 minute experiences that make our life infinitely better.

“Life is nothing more than a stream of experiences — the more widely and deeply you swim in it, the richer your life will be." – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi