Another Choice

Like a memory

There are instants, gestures, scenes, actions that, very suddenly and even before the brain can register and assess them, elicit from deep within one’s breast, silently, a sob of recognition.

Like an immediate breath, from our inmost core, almost painful, it rises to the throat and fills the eyes with tears: it is a reunion, it is gratitude, it is a gulp of Peace…

Perhaps it is the look of abandon and absolute trust of a tiny infant.

Perhaps it is, spontaneous and unexpected, vibrant, clean of calculations, naked, the cry and clamor of support from an audience or a gathered crowd lifted from its ordinariness.

Perhaps it is a simple act of courage, of self-giving, of service.

***

These glimpses have such inner presence that even their tale or the mere recounting of them is enough to evoke this instant response from our core.

As if another being, another self, stood there, just a little in the back, invisible, unknown and normally unperceived, yet attentive and watching everything – as if another person who is oneself, but in the fullness of our void, in the love that we miss. And what those glimpses are, or what they share in common, is that they all carry us in that very second of time, like an explosion of meaning, to a dimension of ourselves and of existence wherein death has no power.

Wherein death cannot operate: as if, in that presence, death had no longer any reason to intervene – as if, here, it had a purpose and there, it no longer had.

These instants, thus charged with presence, never fade away.

They remain in our lives like luminous marks, references that continue to act in us through everything, as if the glimmers of a truer person.

***

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