One Moment, Please

The other evening I was at the station meeting Sam off the 5.35pm train. He was coming from Dublin for a few days, which is always good. I was early so I walked up and down the platform once, as I am wont to do, and then I went back out to the front car park to lean on the stone wall and listen for the train.

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.