Thrive!

Finally it was my turn.

I knelt down on the concrete, balanced on one knee, and put my eye up to the glass lens.

There it was!

The refulgent sun was being eclipsed by a revenant moon.

Beautiful.

And in that moment —  that perfectly rare and gorgeous moment of looking at a great sphere, the sun, 400 times bigger than the other sphere, the moon, but also 400 times further away — I was transfixed.

It was a moment of profound seeing, and of profound forgetting, because to focus on the moon crossing the sun, to concentrate, to see the thing, I was at that time relentlessly forgetting a million other things, massively and momentarily forgetting most of my life.

And this is the thing, this is the wonder within the wonder. To be in the present, we must forget the past. To see with all our might, we must not be anticipating the future.

To see is to be, present.

We tend to think of forgetting as a negative. I forgot my wallet when I drove away from the house today, and I had to go back. But forgetting is the sensory virtue that allows us to escape the thunderous cascade of memory that crowds our minds each and every day.

Looking at the sun eclipsing, I forgot about bushing my teeth earlier today, forgot about driving to the park, forgot about walking to the science center, forgot about every little and big detail that has previously filled up my life.

What a relief.

To lose oneself in the moment is to have respite from the exhausting mountain of sensory impression that we pile up everyday, and relief from all the failures and hurts and losses of life too.

To wonder, at a marvel, in a  moment  — it marvelously hinges on forgetting!

Thank God for forgetting!