Embracing the Moment
…in our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion.
— Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The Quotes
I’ve had a life-long habit of saving quotes, which is something I learned from my mother who kept a little box of them in her room. I’ve decided therefore to sort through them and share some of the wisdom that is stored in my own favorite quotes box, here on my computer.
I’ve started this blog with an excerpt from an amazing lady named Maria Popova, who writes an online blog called The Marginalian.
Embracing the Wobble
The reason I love her quote is her depiction of our existence as “the elemental wobbliness of life.” I really can relate to the wobble. When I was raising our children life was often not just a wobble, it was a spinoff to chaos. Yet, in that chaos there was to be found real joy in the unpredictability and uncertainty of each moment that our small gang of kids created each day. I never knew what they were going to do next.
If, as some advanced thinkers suggest, we exist not in the past, not in the future, but in the present now, then we need to embrace that elemental wobbliness, and be content with not knowing or predicting what might come next. Maria Popova states in the same quote that “The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness…we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. ”
We love certainty. We cherish the steadying crutch of opinion. Well, having kids sure doesn’t encourage steadiness or certainty, although we tend to cling to the faint hope that some predictability might occur within the family dynamic.
The Song
Popova goes on to say “The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject – and us along with it – from the interconnected totality of deep truth.”
The chaos of raising our family brought frustration, panic, confusion and laughter to our home every day, perhaps because I learned that if I couldn’t just dance to the tune that each moment brought, I would become out of step with the song. And my goodness, there were a lot of great songs along the way, now stuffed into my memory.
And so now, with our children grown, raising their own families and (hopefully) experiencing their own moments of chaos, my opinions of how to raise a family have ripened over the years. I now search for that evasive tune that becomes my now moment, hopefully bringing me to the interconnected totality of other moments to create a song that is a constant surprise and one that I am content to embrace.