There is only one moment.  Each moment is the only moment that has ever existed.  The illusion is that there will be another.  This is a fallacy because like snowflakes, each moment is utterly unique.  It is in each moment that we are fortunate to experience life.  We give moments quality, as in good or bad, happy or sad… but the moment itself is just a bubble of possibility.  Hold a child in your arms for the first time… a hour can feel like a second.  Experience the pain of heartbreak and a second feel like an hour.

Each moment is heaven or hell, mostly in how we feel that moment is effecting us.  Have you ever stopped to consider for an instant how amazing it is that we can “feel” anything?  That we, as humans, foster the ability to perceive… to carry forth memory.  Most never stop to think of the amazing biological and physiological processes that occur each time we feel a moment of happiness or sadness.  Of chemicals rushing through our bodies and electrical signals firing to tell us that we are in danger, or that we are touching the face of the person we love.  So much activity, happening instantaneously, lends itself to our “reality.”  The moment simply being the canvas of which our conscious picture is drawn. 

I can remember being in hell.  Wishing for time to move forward quickly during moments I did not want to experience.  For hours and days I remember feeling every second and portion thereof and being in utter agony.  Then one day, I came to realize how amazing it was that I could experience anything at all.  Of course no one consciously “wants” to be in agony, desolate, alone, and discarded… but even those moments can lead us to God as God speaks to us even then.  It is sometimes in those moments where we can experience God the closest… when there is nowhere else to go but inward.  Many people’s natural reaction is to avoid pain at all costs, or to hide from it.  It is our struggle to resist experiencing the “moment” that often gives us the most pain… not necessarily the moment itself.    

During my time in the Navy, I often heard phrase “Pain simply reminds us that we are alive.”  I never contemplated these words much at the time, but in retrospect, I think I now understand their hidden truth.  Pain is there to help us, to shape us, and to act as stimulus to change… to “become” in each new moment, something new, something different than we were before… the next universe… the next moment of consciousness.