Not that I haven't experienced those moments before. I have had plenty of instances in my life where one singular moment changed my entire course. Most times, those changes happen slowly though. A gradual (within months) or relatively quick (within days) difference in my daily comings and goings. The way I handle myself in relationships with family, friends, lovers, co-workers and even myself has changed sometimes at an extremely painful slow pace. The choices I make with my money and my physical self seem immediate, but really they're not, they too are gradual. I suppose the color of my hair has changed somewhat immediately, but even that was a process.
Everything changes. No one is static. As much as I, or anyone else, hate change, it is constantly happening. There's no stopping it. I've been guilty of digging in and being dragged through change, but, in the end, change happened regardless of my unwillingness.
Even my decision to stop using drugs and alcohol, which I celebrate on a single day of each year, wasn't an instance of immediate change. I stopped abruptly, yes, but the process of changing myself to insure that I don't begin again just as abruptly, is a daily process of changing the way I act and react to life around me.
The moment I first realized and recognized the connection I had developed with a Higher Power, wasn't the life changing event, the process was. And that process took almost five years of constant searching and daily work on myself.
This day has made me wonder. At first, I had this moment of sadness, that someone's life had just changed with the firing of a gun. Irrevocably changed. In one single moment. I thought for a bit that violence, deaths, accidents and the like are the only single moments that change a life. I can't being to explain how depressing that thought was. Then I thought about births, marriages, lotteries and such. Those are single moments that change lives forever. That made me feel a little better.
The epiphany lies within the realization that even these moments are all part of a process. Decisions were made to lead to that decision, that even these moments aren't all that singularly momentous. Even natural disasters that destroy lives and homes aren't THE moment that changed it all. Someone built their house on a flood plain or an earthquake fault. Someone didn't watch the weather and follow directions to evacuate.
The epiphany is that no matter how many times I've heard it, I must learn to live in the moment. That's not to say I don't acknowledge that my past has brought me here. That's not to say that I don't make sound decisions so that this moment doesn't negatively effect the future. That's not to say anything except that I fully recognize that this moment will never come again, and I may not have the next one.
