Sombody said live every day like it’s your last, so I stayed in bed all day slipping in and out of consciousness.

A comedian I heard years ago, possibly emo philips – it sounds like him

Years ago I used to write more than I have done recently. I wrote blogs, college newspaper articles, articles for newspapers that people actually read, sermons, short stories, history, and a play that the world didn’t need or want. Now it’s years later and I am a busier person than I have ever been, spending much of my professional life helping others to find their writing voice, but doing so with a nagging sense of having lost my own.

I am now in my fifties and I am not feeling as funny as I once did, though life has given me plenty of material. Perhaps it is the historian in me, but I have always struggled to live in the moment: I spent ten years studying nineteenth century Methodists and six years of my life in museums, one of my favourite pastimes is watching old movies – the past is an interesting place to visit but it is easy to slip into living there and that’s not good for any of us.

Similarly, as we get older the future starts to look like a dauntingly short proposition. I am reminded of an editorial that appeared in the American Primitive Methodist Journal back in 1904 that has always amused me:

“With some of the readers of the Journal the morning of their existence is gone, with others the noon has passed, while with others the night is at hand. Spring time has gone, the summer sun is setting, autumn days are passing, and the white frosts of life’s winter has covered some of our heads. We sincerely wish the readers of the Journal “A HAPPY NEW YEAR”

It is easy to get into that kind of mindset, and I want to avoid it. I’m not going to promise to live in the moment because when I was younger I did try to live that way and that’s how I ended up being pulled over by American cops one Hallowe’en when dressed as a genie but with my head stuck out of the car window because my turban wouldn’t fit on otherwise. There’s dignity in keeping your memories with you. They can make you wince but maybe you won’t make the same mistakes again so it’s probably worth it.

This then is a blog entitled Living in the Moments. It’s an attempt to celebrate those moments in life that I have been overlooking of late, those important, silly, and life affirming moments that are easily forgotten. I’ll draw from the past, and I’ll look to the future but I will try to do it in a way that celebrates now.

Day One of this experiment saw me in the kitchen with my wife Tracey discussing tap dancing routines of old movies we saw when we were children. Both of us recalled that we would see these movies and attempt to copy them, convincing ourselves that we were expert tap dancers just because we could move our feet on a floor and get our shoes to make a racket. The conversation evolved into a practical demonstration with Tracey giving me an impressive bit of the old razzle dazzle as she danced around the kitchen in what I assume is the exact routine she did aged about seven. Ginger Rogers could dance in heels it’s true, but Tracey takes it to a new level of sophistication with her footwear.

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