I Stopped Measuring My Life in Milestones and Started Measuring It in Moments
For a long time i was milestone oriented in a way that made the spaces between milestones feel like waiting rooms. The degree, the job, the relationship, the apartment, the next level of whatever ladder i was on. Each thing arrived, settled briefly into the background, and then became the baseline from which i started looking toward the next one.
The spaces in between, which were most of my actual life, were things to get through rather than things to be in.
I cannot point to a single moment where that shifted. It was more gradual than that. A slow accumulation of noticing what i actually remembered from the previous year when i sat with it honestly. Almost never the milestones. Almost always the small things. A specific conversation on a specific evening. The way light came through a window one morning when i was in no particular hurry. A meal that was just a meal but eaten with someone whose company made it something else.
The milestones were real and they mattered. But they were not where the texture of my life actually lived. The texture was in the ordinary days, the ones i had been moving through with my attention somewhere ahead of where i actually was.
There is a way of being present to ordinary time that i think is one of the more undervalued skills available to a person. Not mindfulness in the formal practiced sense necessarily. Just actually being where you are instead of perpetually somewhere slightly ahead of it, waiting for the next significant thing to arrive before you allow yourself to register what is currently happening.
The moments that i will carry longest from this period of my life are probably happening right now in some form. Ordinary days that do not announce themselves as significant. Conversations that seem like nothing in particular. The unremarkable texture of a life being lived.
That is where the life actually is. Not in the milestones. In the spaces between them that i used to treat as filler.
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