You have to sit still to capture something. The universe is, at its simplest, a coalition of serendipitous moments. If you linger just longer than you have to, oftentimes you witness the magic that most of us bustle past. Get out of the city, lay in a hammock, experience the butterfly migration as it occurs around you.

Oftentimes we find ourselves in moments, experienced so purely and without haste, wishing never again to take advantage of them. We conjure, in hypotheticals, a future version of ourselves that will be experiencing this as memory – so purely and without haste – in longing of what we now have. Suddenly, we curse every version of ourselves that didn’t savor it so completely. But perhaps these very sober moments of clarity are all that are really needed. These pauses in our fruitless scurrying to more fully appreciate what is before us.

The passage of time is a cursed thing that we will never, until our final exhale, stop resisting. We know that it’s passing, even as we curse it. We anticipate in great despair all that it will claim from us. We hasten now to squander what we can. But perhaps it is our moments of inaction that hold greater purpose. Perhaps when we lie very still and allow a moment to overtake us, we gain more than we ever will by clawing away at a faceless, passive flicker.