The Best Days
Matt Haig:
“You don’t need to deny the reality of the present in order to have hope, you just need to know the future is uncertain, and that life contains light as well as dark.”
At the end of a very hard year, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts (EarBiscuits – highly recommend). The two hosts had compiled a list of the ten most memorable moments from the year. This included hard things as well as exciting moments, and their discussion was honest and fun. After listening, I knew that I had to put together my own list.
I think one aspect of life that I struggle with is living in the present moment – I wonder, does anyone NOT struggle with this? But an activity like reflecting on a year gone by, on all of its highs and lows, turned out to be an extremely grounding and rewarding experience for me. I still will look back at that list and marvel at how some of the moments that felt so simple and unimportant at the time were actually ones that stuck with me and brought me joy.
To quote Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.” I have always struggled with maintaining long term and some short term memory, so I am especially aware that the pictures that remain stuck in my head from an event or a trip are the kinds that are worth honoring and remembering. This retrospective approach to life gives a different lens to the experience, and makes you realize that the awareness and wonder for that present moment should have been at the front of your mind even as it was happening. Looking back at the last ten or so years, there are a few that stick out to me.
Concerts and music festivals will always result in some of my most lasting and happiest memories. Avicii playing an arena concert at the University of New Hampshire, Firefly Music Festival in Delaware, the Gentlemen of the Road stopovers in Ontario and New Jersey, and Boston Calling are a few of my most grounded and enjoyable experiences. It is always spent with people you love, listening to music that speaks to your soul, and often eating really good food while you are at it.
When I was studying abroad in Austria in college, I spent a day exploring Vienna on my own and falling even more in love with the city and country. I loved that I could follow steps from previous trips based on memory alone, that I had the chance to explore new locations with the freedom of only doing what I desired, and that I got to live in my own thoughts and head throughout the day.
The day after our wedding, we took a day trip to Hallstatt with a few of our wedding guests. It was a bucket list item for a lot of people in our group, and it was so amazing to see everything through their eyes and enthusiasm. Those photos are some of my favorites to look back on, because I can feel the joy and contentment from this first day married to my best friend, with some of my favorite people adventuring alongside us.
There are simple days without anything grand, new or exciting in particular that also stay with me. We lived at our in-laws’ home on Plum Island during our first year of marriage. We did a weeklong “staycation”, and I spent one day outside on the porch for hours. I practiced some yoga, read Michelle Obama’s book Becoming and Mari Andrew’s book Am I There Yet, ate good food and just generally soaked up the day. I have a photo on my phone of an excerpt from Mari’s book, where she defines the Portuguese word saudade, which is loosely translated as “the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again.” So many of these moments are perfectly captured by this definition, and the real blessing is to be able to see it as that even while you are living that moment.
Some of my favorite days and nights are the ones that feel like they may never end. An annual tradition for us was attending the CF Crawl for a Cure in Boston. The year I lived in the city, we spent the day on the bar crawl, ventured out to eat food, and came back to my apartment to hang out afterwards. My best friend’s 24th birthday was also spent out in the city, where we somehow were in the club a half hour before they were even open and stayed well past when the house lights came back on, then wandered home through the warm September night. We had a handful of all-nighters in high school and college, featuring long summer nights in the beach house staying up until the sun rose over the ocean. Somehow it was a gauntlet that only 3-4 people would pass, and it was always a victorious and delirious feeling to go to bed as the birds and sky were awakening.
These moments are somehow frozen in time and also endless in my mind and the story of my own life. Maybe there are others. In fact, I’m sure there are more. This list is far from exhaustive and my memory is far from perfect. But I invite you to reflect on some of these days in your own life, savor them, invoke the feelings they bring, pick out the details that mean so much to you. I will leave you with one final quote from Søren Kierkegaard, paraphrased by Matt Haig in his phenomenal “Comfort Book”: life is “understood backward; but it must be lived forward”.