I attend a good deal of live theater in New York City. I believe in taking advantage of this incredible City that is at my fingertips and the theater in NYC is one of passions. As in life, some plays are phenomenal and some not so great. A few nights ago I saw a not so great play entitled Happiness BUT it did give me something to think about and a tool to utilize on those days that I am feeling not so great.
The Perfect Moment. The concept presented in the play was this: 10 or so people are trapped in a subway car, all of them suddenly made aware of the fact that they have died. The conductor informs them that they must come up with a Perfect Moment from their lives and if they do so, eternity can be spent in that perfect moment. Oh if that were actually true!
So slowly but surely, each of them arrives at their perfect moment. For an older woman, it is a moment from the 1940’s when she was dancing with a soldier at a USO dance and he asked her to be his girl. For a doorman, it was when his Dad took him to the 1954 playoff game where he saw Willie Mays make a ground-shaking catch. For a young Hispanic bicycle delivery man it was when he dressed up as the tooth fairy and gave his daughter her 50 cents. For a young woman who spent her life in Manhattan selling perfume at Bloomingdales and living in a make believe world of the rich, it was a night on the beach in Brooklyn with her sweetheart. And so on.
I give my clients undergoing divorce a ‘time-out’ exercise that allows them to bypass a negative emotional reaction. They sit quietly and spend a minute or so taking deep, cleansing breaths to slow down their heart rate and thus calm themselves. In the past, I have asked them to then visualize a time when they were joyful or at peace. Now I plan on using the Perfect Moment.
Here a few of my Perfect Moments:
- playing in the woods with my gang of neighborhood friends when I was a kid
- Sitting  at a dinner table with my dearest friends for my 50th birthday
- Lying in bed with my teenage daughter and just talking about her life
- Falling asleep with my children when they were young, cuddled up to me in my bed
- Awakening from a deep sleep and seeing my two year old son, standing with his blanky, staring intno my eyes.
- Hiking in the rain-forest
- Sitting on my Dad’s lap
- Immediately after my wedding ceremony when my ex and I sat alone together for a half an hour to ponder the wonder of being married..
- Lying with a sleeping infant on my chest.
- Talking on the phone late at night with my first boyfriend
There are so many of those perfect moments in our lives but we forget about them all too soon. Its the muck of life that seems to be on our minds most of the time. We have to remember to remember the perfect moments in our lives, especially when life is not treating us so good. These are gifts we can give ourselves to bring a smile to our face and realize that life is indeed good.
