Find Gold In Every Moment

It's there

A neighbour's cow caught in sunlight, giving me a moment full of gold. Photo by author.

My mother is 93. Last month she fell and broke her left hip, was taken to Fiona Stanley Hospital by ambulance and underwent surgery. I drove to Perth to be with her and spent three days with other family members by her bedside, watching her slowly recover from the ordeal.

Through the hospital window on the fourth floor, I looked out at grey skies and tried not to listen to the TV of the occupant in the next bed, which was turned up loud, spilling dreary world news into the small room. My mother is easily confused, and I hoped she didn’t think that the disasters she was overhearing would soon overtake her.

Despite Mum’s post-operative discomfort, her periods of delirium, the dull sky and the news reader’s voice, I experienced many golden moments in that hospital. There is gold – something precious, something illuminating, something with an eternal glow about it – in every moment, every situation.

Hospitals hold an immense amount of pain, suffering, stress, worry, emergency, separation, grief. But they also hold countless golden moments, as I witnessed hourly. People were serving coffee, cooking meals, giving calm advice, stroking a brow, holding a hand, mopping a floor, bringing flowers, generating laughter, feeding those who were incapable of feeding themselves, inserting needles as gently as possible, smiling, coaxing, being firm but tender with broken bones and broken lives.

Find the Gold

When everything is going fine, we tend to move through life in an independent, self-contained, autonomous fashion. But when things go unexpectedly wrong and we find ourselves in hospital, or out of a job, or by a graveside, we realise we are held within a web of endless connection. We need each other.

In her book, Trusting the Gold, Sara Brach wrote:

Our deepest intuition is that there is something beyond our habitual story of a separate and isolated self: something vast, mysterious, and sacred.

To me, something that is vast, mysterious, and sacred is the connection we have with everything and everyone. This connection is like a deep river that carries us along through life, upholding us, keeping despair at bay, buoying hope, dispensing kindness, displaying love.

In her book, The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chödrön wrote:

Acknowledging the preciousness of each day is a good way to live, a good way to reconnect to our basic joy.

Acknowledging the preciousness – the gold – within each moment (not just each day) is a good way to live too, because it keeps us connected to the undercurrent of joy that our soul knows.

Most moments can seem ordinary. We do habitual things. The world spins. Clouds come and go. People say what they said yesterday. The evening news is a regurgitation of previous weeks. The car needs refueling. Food prices keep go up. Bank balances keep go down. Skins wrinkle just a little bit more. But no matter how ordinary they seem, there is gold hidden in each of these moments.

There is gold – something precious, something illuminating, something with an eternal glow about it – in every moment, every situation.

Let’s find the gold. It’s there.

Mum is slowly recovering. Here's a recent photo of the two of us.

Mum is recovering well. Family photo.

Love, Marlane