At the end of first year, I made a list in my journal of all my favourite moments, pages and pages of bullet points. Reading that list a year later, there are definitely a whole other 10 pages I can fill, of things I’ve learnt, things I’m grateful for, things I’ve tried and probably wouldn’t try again. Living and travelling through moments of change, I’ve truly found myself capturing what I really value—the small moments. Sharing songs on an evening walk, or always shivering slightly in Seeley library, and mornings-turned-afternoons in Caffe Nero, battling the shuddering wifi and playing seat lottery for a plug socket.
What I’ve learnt from my thought daughter activities of constantly pondering on memories and living in the past, is that, whilst creating a ‘highlights reel’ of life can seen reductive (both metaphorically and literally on my bloated Instagram page), I truly believe that moments really do matter. Time crystallised into an instant is not the shaving away of experience but a way of cupping it close to you forever.
I’ve been documenting life as it passes me by ever since I was nine and got it into my head that I simply had to beg my mum to buy me a £7 black diary from big Sainsbury’s. To be dramatic, I’ve 11 years of life condensed neatly into four A5 black leather-bound notebooks, from year 3 to this third year of university. Through exam seasons, friendship break-ups, moving, moments of rage, moments of happiness, moments of melancholy, moments of confusion, of adversity of achievement. A catalogue of instances, a collage of moments that project my life in a a flurry of black, blue and occasionally red ink. There’s even parts where I’ve read back over, years later, and commented, updated or refuted my own words. My dissertation supervisor sometimes called essays dialogues with other voices, and if thats true, my diaries are simply dialogues with myself—though, when I started writing, I did unironically address my diary as a living, breathing soul, justifying my thoughts and feelings as if my diary was about to speak back.
As a reader, and occasional writer, as someone who spends hours upon hours in worlds aside from my reality (beyond, even, what the degree demands), I am no stranger to feeling homesick for moments that have now faded to memories. But further still, sometimes I catch myself in the present moment already missing it, mid-laugh or mid-dinner already trying to cling to the moment because I know it will pass. My friends and I are unashamed creatures of nostalgia, with conversations that wind from ‘remember when’ to ‘we were so young’ to ‘imagine next year, or in five years, or ten’. And then we inevitably spiral under the disorienting sensation of time slipping from under us, and the feeling of our looming futures nipping at our heels, bright and wild and unknown.
And here I think is the crux of it. Yes, there is something beautiful about the fleeting nature of our lives, the temporality of moment after moment sequentially, the steady marching beat of time punctuated by memories collected and remembered. But we must centrally remember, internalise, anchor ourselves with the fact that our lives are merely but a drop in the ocean.
As the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said,
“This world in comparison with the Hereafter is like the amount of water one of you gets when he dips his finger in the sea. Let him see what his finger returns with.”
~ Sahih Muslim
It truly is never that deep. We are wayfarers through this life to the next. This life feels like flashing moments because that is all it truly is. A snapshot of glamour, of pain, of hardship, of peace and trials and beauty that cannot and will not last. And neither will we. This isn’t some existential, depressing claim, but rather a truth that fills me with the peace that nothing, truly nothing will last forever. And this is why you must live fully whilst you have time. This, here, now will never return to you. I think about one of my favourite movies, About Time, which is basically a visualisation of everything I’ve just said, in a much more eloquent way. As Tim says in his final monologue (mild spoilers, sorry x),
“I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary ordinary life”.
So, as I try to extricate the one bit of my mind always living in the past somewhere, I remind myself, and you, that yes, the moment matters. It matters. Live it well, help others, do good, eat a sweet treat, buy an iced coffee, pray your prayers, live in them, and be grateful for the Qadr of Allah that has allowed you to land exactly where you are.
I hope you’ve enjoyed my words.
Zaynub <3
