On the way to the wall, I met the retired station master who
must still live in the little house by the platform. He was wielding a large
sweeping brush with intent and I jokingly raised my hands and said, “I
surrender, don’t do it.” We both had a laugh at that and then briefly discussed
how ‘close’ the evening was, which is West of Ireland parlance for the humidity
one feels sometimes before a storm arrives.
I moved on to the always-locked gate in the stone wall that separates
the car park from the platform and I leaned on the chest-high structure and gazed up
the track. The air was ‘close’ but not unpleasant.
And that’s when I had one of those moments that I have
sometimes. Several of them have actually occurred at the train station when
waiting to meet someone off the train. I think that’s because it’s a curious
few moments of ‘limbo’ where I have nothing else to do and nowhere else to be.
It’s a rare status and it sometimes invites reflection in.
Anyway, I didn’t have a blackout or a fall or anything weird
or troubling like that. All that happened was that I became aware, in quite a heightened
way, that I was alive in that particular moment and at that particular time…
(MUM!!! Ken's gone Nut-Nut again!!)
No, calm down, I’m sure we all do it from time to time. I know
I do. It’s just a momentary realisation that this moment wasn’t here a moment
ago and will be history in another moment. So, you know, you look around, take it in,
try to file something away from it.
It’s a bit like when you’re watching a movie on the telly
and you want a cup of tea so your pause it for a minute and, suddenly, the
movie is reduced to one frozen image on the screen. Back in VHS days, the frozen image would
have been a blurry hazy mess. But, these days, it’s likely that it is one perfect snapshot from the entire cacophony of images that make up
the film. The other evening, I was watching ‘Maverick’ on some TV channel. You know,
the one with Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster. Pure popcorn hokum, obviously, but
interesting to me because it was written by William Goldman, who is the GOAT in
my opinion. Even with this throwaway entertainment, you can see him straining
at the leash, trying to milk some golden moments and turnarounds from the
available material. Anyway, in the middle of it all, I wanted a break so I
paused it. And the image than froze on the screen was an almost-perfect one of
a cowboy sitting by a campfire at sunset with the rays of the sun streaming
through the trees behind him and he all in silhouette. It was quite something.
The point is, I wouldn’t have even noticed that image if I
hadn’t frozen the show for that moment.
So, back there at the train station wall, I had nothing
better to do and nowhere else to be so I took a beat and noted that this was the
moment that it was. Not the previous moment, nor some moment yet to come, but
this very moment.
I put my hands on the top of stone wall and it was cool to my compromised touch on
that ‘close’ evening. How many decades had that wall stood here? How many
people had waited at this wall for someone beloved to arrive on the train? How
many people had caught a final glimpse of someone as the same train whisked
them away forever?
This was the thought in the moment. There were other elements to the moment too; the birds gathered in the trees, the trees themselves, threatening to
change colour to pipe in the Autumn, the cars and the people in them. Everything. A moment.
Just a moment.
I suppose you could call it mindfulness. I don’t ever fully
understand what that is. I looked up this 'moment' thing and there is a sort of a word for
it, though I don’t think it appears in any of the formal dictionaries.
Ambedo - A state of deep, quiet immersion in small
present-moment details.
There’s a song in a musical, ‘This Is My Moment.’ I
think it’s from Jekyll and Hyde. Maybe it’s about his big moment, when he’s got the potion in his
hand and he’s about to knock it back for the first time. I haven’t a clue, to be honest. I’m just
shooting the breeze.
Whatever it’s about, it wasn’t what I was about at the train
station the other evening. That thing at the station wasn’t ‘my big moment’. It was just one in a long
string of thousands of moments, paused, acknowledged, picked up, briefly inspected, considered, and set back down.
Nothing wrong with that, I reckon.
