What a morning.

Actually, what a week.

It is Wednesday morning, and I am doing what I do most mornings these days. I am “working remotely,” which sounds considerably more professional than saying I am sitting in my adjustable bed with my legs and feet up, laptop in front of me, slurping coffee while attempting to accomplish important things before the rest of the world gets too noisy.

This morning’s important thing happens to be the bylaws for the Happiness Matters Foundation. Nothing says, “Good morning, Sunshine!” quite like governance, voting procedures, and figuring out how to make sure something you created can continue doing what it was created to do long after you are no longer the one sitting in bed arguing with the wording.

I was somewhere between a sip of coffee and yet another paragraph of nonprofit legalese when I learned that Tim Curry had died.

Well, shit.

For a moment, the bylaws disappeared. I have loved Tim Curry for as long as I can remember. Of course there is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which somehow managed to become a timeless classic by being completely inappropriate, wonderfully weird, and unlike anything else. Come to think of it, that might explain some of my affection for it. But there were so many other roles too, and seeing his name immediately brought back memories of movies and characters and moments scattered across decades.

Then one particular memory wandered in.

A long, long time ago, we were in London for a swim meet for the kids. Somewhere in the middle of all the swimming and traveling and doing whatever else accompanied those trips, Jeff, the kids, and I went to see Spamalot.

Tim Curry was King Arthur.

It happened to be his final week playing the role. I remember knowing that made the performance special, but I don't remember thinking much beyond that. Why would I? We were in London. The kids were swimming. We were seeing a show. Tim Curry was standing onstage playing King Arthur. It was simply a moment we were living.

Until this morning, when it became something else.

Funny how that happens. One moment you are sitting in a theater in London, and the next you are sixty years old, sitting in an adjustable bed in Colorado with your feet up, drinking coffee and working on nonprofit bylaws when someone's death suddenly carries you backward through time.

And this week has apparently decided to become one giant collection of those moments.

Monday morning started with me taking a shower. That really shouldn't qualify as noteworthy, but apparently Monday had other plans. While I was in the shower, the smoke detectors decided to lose their collective minds. Every alarm in the house started screaming while I was wet, naked, and in absolutely no position to go casually strolling around the house investigating the situation.

There are moments in life that become precious memories. And then there are moments that become stories because what the actual FiretrUCK was that?

Monday definitely belonged to the second category.

By Tuesday, things had calmed down enough for me to head to the dentist and finally have the last of the amalgam removed from my mouth. That moment actually mattered quite a bit to me. It had taken months to get there, with more than a few unexpected detours along the way, and there was something wonderfully satisfying about finally being able to say it was done.

Then I learned Dolly Parton had died. Another name that had simply always been there. Another person whose work had woven itself into millions of lives without most of us ever stopping to think about it. And now Tim Curry. It would have been easy to decide that this was becoming a really shitty week.

Except today is also August 26.

Thirty-seven years ago today, Jeff and I got married in a small church in Germany that was built in 1100-somewhere. We had already officially married at the Standesamt on May 19, 1989, but on August 26 we stood in a church and did it all over again.

Thirty-seven years.

I wonder what I thought life would look like thirty-seven years later. Actually, I don't remember. I doubt twenty-three-year-old me was standing there imagining sixty-year-old me in an adjustable bed with a laptop, a wheelchair nearby, writing bylaws for a nonprofit while drinking coffee and remembering Tim Curry. I'm fairly certain that particular vision board did not exist.

Yet here we are.

Tomorrow is Jeff's birthday, and Saturday, I will hold my first group QHHT session. And suddenly this week doesn't feel like a collection of unrelated things anymore. It feels like moments. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Some enormous. Some ridiculously ordinary. Some beautiful. Some painful. Some funny only after enough time has passed that you can finally stop saying, “Are you fucking kidding me?” long enough to laugh.

Some we remember forever. Some disappear almost immediately. And some sit quietly somewhere inside us for years until a name, a song, a smell, a photograph, or a Wednesday morning cup of coffee opens a door we didn't even know was there.

That's the strange thing about moments. While we're living them, we rarely know which ones will matter.

When we sat in that theater in London watching Tim Curry play King Arthur, I didn't know I would be sitting here remembering it all these years later. I didn't know that someday the kids would be grown, Jeff and I would have thirty-seven years of marriage behind us, and the man on that stage would become the reason that particular evening suddenly came wandering back into my life.

We were just there. Living.

The same was true on August 26, 1989. We weren't creating a memory. We were getting married. The memory came later.

Maybe that's true of most of life. The moment happens first, and then we tell ourselves a story about it.

Sometimes we tell that story for years. Sometimes the story changes as we do. Something that once felt devastating becomes the beginning of something we couldn't see yet. Something we barely noticed becomes precious because we now understand how temporary it was. Something that pissed us off becomes absolutely hilarious once enough distance exists between us and the smoke detector.

The moment doesn't change. But the story can.

And maybe that's why perspective matters so much. Not because we should turn every painful thing into something positive. Not because every moment happens for some grand cosmic reason we are supposed to figure out. And definitely not because we need to “cherish every moment.”

Please.

Some moments belong in the Fuckit Bucket. But even those moments become part of the collection.

Life isn't happening someday when we finally get everything figured out. It isn't waiting for the next birthday, anniversary, accomplishment, vacation, beginning, or ending. It is happening while we're slurping coffee, sitting in dentist chairs, listening to smoke detectors scream, watching someone perform on a stage without realizing we will remember that night decades later, writing bylaws, celebrating thirty-seven years with someone, grieving people we never personally knew but who somehow became part of our lives anyway, and looking forward to Saturday without having the slightest idea which moment from that day will eventually become a story.

Maybe that is what struck me this morning.

Life is made up of moments in time. But what we carry with us are the stories we tell ourselves about them.

And right now, sitting here in my adjustable bed with my laptop, my feet up, and whatever is left of my coffee, I can't help wondering how many completely ordinary moments I am living today that someday I will give anything to remember.

I don't know.

That's the beautiful part.

Right now, I'm just living them.

What about you?

What moments have been wandering back into your life lately? Not necessarily the big ones. Maybe it's something completely ordinary you hadn't thought about in years. A song. A person. A ridiculous family story. A place you once visited. A moment that meant almost nothing while you were living it and somehow means everything now.

And when you remember it today, is the story you tell yourself about that moment still the same? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Either way, it became part of you.

And somewhere today, you're probably living another moment whose story hasn't even been written yet.

If you enjoy wandering through life's wonderfully messy, meaningful, ridiculous moments with me, subscribe to Notes from the Wild so you don't miss the next adventure. Around here, we never really know which ordinary Tuesday is going to become a story.

Maybe that's part of why the Happiness Matters Foundation matters so much to me. We don't get to choose all the moments life hands us, and some of them can knock the wind right out of us. But sometimes one moment of connection, one experience, one person showing up, or one unexpected shift in perspective can remind us that another possibility still exists.

That's what Hope in Motion is really about. Creating more of those moments. The ones where someone feels a little less alone, sees something they couldn't see before, or remembers that the story they're carrying isn't necessarily the only story they can tell.

If you'd like to help us create more of those moments, come see what we're building at the Happiness Matters Foundation. Maybe you'll find a way to be part of someone's story too.

And somewhere today, you're probably living another moment whose story hasn't even been written yet.

If you enjoy wandering through life's wonderfully messy, meaningful, ridiculous moments with me, subscribe to Notes from the Wild so you don't miss the next adventure. Around here, we never really know which ordinary Tuesday is going to become a story.

Shift happens...