In one of her short stories, the belle epoque novelist Colette remarked on the brief summery pleasure of holding a frog in one’s hand, with its cool soft belly gently resting on one’s palm. It is a small satisfaction, that feeling, and I remember enjoying it in childhood, but I’d forgotten it until now.
What brought Colette’s observation to mind was a moment this week when I was sitting on the sofa reading a newspaper. The room was quiet; everyone else had breakfasted and gone off into the sunshine. A neighbor was mowing his lawn, as if cued to supply a classic summertime soundtrack.
There I sat, reading about the presidential campaign in a fugitive moment of calm, when something lovely and soft pressed against my bare foot. It was the furry chin of Billy the Wonder Dog, who had very quietly approached, lain down and gently come to rest at my feet in his most affecting man’s-best-friend style.
For an instant, I felt as though time had stopped. It was such an unexpectedly delicious sensation, this combination of warm doggy chin, soft cushions, sunlight, newsprint and silence (apart from the comforting hum of the mower).
It occurred to me that the sensation of time stopping, accompanied by an intense awareness of the setting, is exactly what people mean when they talk about being “fully present” or “in the moment.”
Having not paid much attention to my surroundings, I had suddenly become fully present in the room, on the sofa, with the dog. My dulled senses were abruptly made sharp, and took in everything that was around me. It was a sufficiently novel sensation that I felt a pang at realizing how seldom it happens.
Young children live in a state of full presence, lucky things. The older you get, the harder it is. I suspect that most of my fellow adults go about their business with their minds divided into messy segments made up of past (memories, old arguments), future (looming obligations, the to-do list), and only semiconscious present-tense thoughts and actions (uh, let me just check my email). Technology is perhaps the greatest destroyer of moment-dwelling, giving us, as it has, hordes of zombielike individuals whose hunched bodies may be in the room, but whose minds have disappeared into their screens and can only with difficulty be brought out again. This state is known, tellingly, as “absent presence.”
Yet the only time we have is now; the only moment is the one we’re in, and if we miss it, we’ve lost it. It’s gone! Yikes!
The truth is, probably every day we miss a hundred moments of fugitive sweetness that, if we could only observe them, we would dramatically enrich our lives. The beautiful shock of air-conditioning after you’ve been in the sweltering outdoors, the laughter of cafe diners carried on warm evening air, the cool belly of a frog in the palm — such are the fleeting pleasures of summer. They’re well worth noticing, don’t you think?
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at mgurdon@ washingtonexaminer.com.
