Live in the moment. Be in the moment. Capture the moment.
We were in the middle of a heavy talk when my phone alarm went off. It caught me by surprise, but then I remembered exactly why I had set it. “We need a picture together,” I said. He smiled. In the few months we had been dating, we had never paused for a snapshot. And now here we were…our last night together before he was moving his life to another state, and I was jetting off on the solo vacay I had booked before I had even met him.
“We’re gonna have to selfie it,” I said…
…And then I remembered how he felt about selfies. In one of our previous heavy conversations (we’d had more than a few lately), he had told me about some significant loss in his life. One of the major ones was when a cousin he was close to suddenly got very sick with a rare form of cancer. There was no hope for a cure and treatments were abysmal. So when they thought she might only have a few weeks left, he dropped everything and headed home to Peru to spend time with her and his family. A long flight later, he went out with her and several other cousins (note: traditional Latin, Catholic family = LOTS of cousins) immediately upon arrival. This favorite cousin asked him to take a selfie with her (apparently selfies were her thing…she had a selfie stick and everything lol). Incredibly sleep-deprived, he promised her he would take one tomorrow instead, after he got rid of the bags under his eyes.
Well, sadly, he never got the chance. She was hospitalized early the next morning and passed away later that day. He says he’ll always regret not taking the picture, under-eye bags and all. Because he didn’t know it in that moment, but it was the last time he would see her.
“I learned then and there…always take the selfie.”
Suddenly it all made so much sense. He was so good at living in the moment. At being in the moment. He was definitely better at this than other lawyers, and even better at it than most people I had met. It was because he knew that nothing in this life was guaranteed. Reminding me of this was one of the best gifts he had given me.
And just as everything was about to change…I captured the moment with the man who taught me to “always take the selfie.”
