$2.15 and No Cream

Just now the girl told me how many dollars I owed, and asked if I wanted room for cream. I reached into my wallet and paused.. left her for a moment in expectant and confused silence. Don't know why, but I was suddenly inundated with thoughts of how quickly my perspective on life changes. I re-focused momentarily to tell her ‘no,’ but sitting here now I’m trying to grasp the impermanence of my views. I’m a fickle being; I can dance between optimism and lackluster indifference within a matter of hours.

I wish I was better at creating visual representations of my thoughts.

Because I’m wondering what would happen if I were able to take the way I feel right now about myself and my future and translate it into an image on a transparent sheet, and then tomorrow do it again, and then next week do it again… and so on and so on, until 40 years from now I would have stacks of transparencies filled with myriad designs. And I could lay them all on top of each other to see the lines of doubt and optimism bleed into each other. Splotches of discouragement and drops of apathy could seep into the curves of hope. And I think that’d be nice to see.

Many people think that each phase of life contributes something to the ‘big picture;’ that every experience and relationship holds some kind of significance, whether or not we understand it. But individually, a moment feels like just one moment, and sentiment for the current experience is isolated.

But imagine seeing all of it together in one comprehensive image- a glimpse of how even the ugliest and most pessimistic of days contributed to the stunning final piece. I imagine I'd be wonderfully shocked at how instrumental each ordinary moment really was..