“I find you to be intriguing,” he said, with a smile.
“I don’t consider that to be a compliment,” she lied.
—
Life is full of small, short, moments. The kind so fleeting you may not even remember them as time passes. Moments that feel like a pin prick. Sharp. Shocking. All consuming. Then, gone. In a world full of all sorts of ways to representment ourselves, I think the small moments are most telling of who we are.
In July, I took a seemingly innocent trip to a second hand store to search for a mantle for my new house. My home has an incredibly majestic wall, and I despartly wanted to install a mantle. While rounding a corner, I came upon a fleet of pianos. Aisles and aisles of pianos. Right in the middle, a broken, red piano cried out to me. I loved it. I lamented my love for this piano. In a small moment, I said, “I want this piano.” In the next small moment, he said, “We can make that happen.”
The piano now lives in my home, thanks to a now stranger but once lover. Our moments ended but that piano lives here with me (seemingly forever because this beauty is heavy af).
It is a fascinating thing to learn something completely new as an adult. To have to be taught like a toddler, having no sense of how something works or how to teach yourself to be better. This piano, each week, is teaching me about humility, patience, exhaustion, presence, and joy.
In many way, this piano serves as a metaphor for my adult life. The reckless love, the regret once realizing how broken it was, the sense of fear I’ve felt in trying to learn and understand it, and the awe I am in when I watch its ability to produce happiness in others.
Being an adult, for me, is about recognizing the joy that exists. Not being so greedy that I want more. Not being so scared they aren’t big enough. Not being sad they aren’t more. And not being selfish enough to sabotage them. Just sinking into to those small moments and being thankful they exist. Being an adult is about making sure my expectations of myself are right-sized, not overshadowing or washing-out the small, tiny, pockets of joy.