If I hadn’t stopped scrolling, I wouldn’t have started petting Ziggy.
If I hadn’t pet Ziggy, he never would have put his head in my lap and looked at me with those eyes to take him for a walk.
If I hadn’t gone for a walk, I would not have run into the Italian Ice guy.
If I hadn’t got an Italian Ice, I never would have looked for a place to sit by the lake.
And if I hadn’t found the spot by the tree on the hill by the lake, I would have missed the moment when all these wonderful things happened at once:
Ziggy, stopping his panting...
The blue raspberry part of my “Spiderman” Italian Ice finally revealing itself...
Whodini’s “5 Minutes of Funk’ playing on a car radio…
A baby and a man laughing in unison…
Two runners criss-crossing in opposite directions and both of them, at the same time, giving me the “whassup” nod.…
A kayak gliding by and slicing apart the reflection in the water behind the runners…
The sun moving just a hair closer to the horizon, enough so that the light got squeezed between the tops of the buildings, and softened…
A breeze. Ah yes…. my reward for noticing.
It was a close call.
I could have missed it all. I could have missed this moment, had I stayed back there at the house, laying on my back on the living room rug, feet up on the sofa watching someone I don’t know try to bank a frisbee off a refrigerator into a garbage can.
—
The best moment, or maybe just the moment you need right now, is out there hidden underneath a stack of other moments waiting to be discovered, like a diamond in a piece of coal, created a long time ago and ready to come out for you.
You can’t know. It doesn’t take much work.
But you’ve got to move.