One Moment

Life is pretty busy. Many of us work multiple jobs or have multiple businesses. We have to juggle family, work, and other personal obligations. Some of us have health issues or personal crises to manage on top of it all. The world at the moment is going through some massive tectonic shifts on its environmental, political, and socio-economic planes. And the icing on the cake? It’s time for the holidays and all the emotion they can bring.

We invite you to take a few moments to just breathe.

We’ve found this video for the song “The One Moment” by the band OK Go. It takes our breath away and we want to share it with you. It’s a magical work of art. How they made it happen is beyond our imagination.

From the moment the opening salvo takes root, the explosion of color and noise, the visual shock, and then the message: what you saw was real and it took 4.2 seconds. After you watch it, take a moment to reflect that what you saw was real, not visual effects.

Just as in life sometimes, after we watch the frantic part of the video, then we get the chance to catch up. To consciously take in those 4.2 seconds that had assailed the unconscious which had seen everything. To slow down–to really slow down–felt like being able to exhale, deeply, slowly.

The message is not just that we need to slow down. It’s not just that when we do slow down, we can see detail and beauty that otherwise passes us by in the blur of ‘busyness’. The message is that there is beauty in chaos and beauty in destruction. Messy can be beautiful, and messy can be liberating.

Often it seems that the world is one big ball of chaos, with destruction upon destruction being wreaked upon it by the forces of nature and humanity. It can be hard to find beauty in that destruction; in fact, to do so might even seem disrespectful of those who are hurt and affected by it. Yet if we slow things down and look at the detail within the chaos, we can also observe a hope to overcome adversity, to repair, to live. We can see people doing superhuman things to help their neighbors. We can see the beauty of humankind.

Slow down. Look around. What beautiful things can you see in the chaos of everyday living?