Every Moment Just Once

This is a thought I am carrying into this new year, and I’m putting it here in case it helps you, too.

I am not fantastic about remaining in the moment, and I’m usually thinking about things ending just as they’re beginning. But maybe that isn’t a terrible thing. I’m just attuned to the passing of time, and maybe that can work for me as much as it takes away from the pleasure of the moment.

I recently read something that stuck with me in Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter about hoarding life:

Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.

You only get to live each moment once, just as you only get to drink each cup of tea once (even if there is a different cup of tea in the future). It’s the once-ness of it, that appreciation that you’ve gotten to have the experience at all vs. being sad that it’s over (when it has just begun), that keeps me — for a brief second — in the moment instead of floating mentally ahead. Just acknowledging that you get every moment just once.