Moments

It is dawn. On Wall Street the clamor and clang is cranking up. The world’s economic decisions are warily being made. The future is uncertain.

Here in my corner where I write I can hear the birds clamoring in the trees, waking up. There is frost on the ground and juicy new green buds popping out ripe little nuggets on the bare branches. It is spring.

I am having a moment.

When we visited my Gramma she would suggest as we entered that we “Have a cuppa.” This was a signal that a moment was about to begin, that a small familiar ritual would take place; the pouring of a sweet fragrant tea that clung to your nostrils in dewy drops, a dark smoky coffee thickened with cream. There were cookies, usually made by her deft gnarled hands or more frugally produced from a tin, a relic of earlier times. Sometimes there were games of yahtzee with the thunk and clatter of the dice and war cries, sometimes puzzles requiring silent concentration with room only for the occasional comment. Each person was given a time to talk and my grandmother answered with insightful questions and comments to let you know that you had been heard. Even the littlest person had importance and weight. Everyone had a moment, something to savor and hold like the lemon drops she sometimes doled out as we left.

The beauty of the moment lay in its isolation. Gramma pulled each of us out of the mundane for a while, made us the star of the show, nurtured each and every one of us and armed us to go back out again.

These visits were the essence of Hygge.

Today it is rare for any of us, small or big to rest, to consider, to share together. We blunder through our day on cereal bars, Starbucks, and frozen pizza. We huddle together for a few minutes at night in front of the tv before going our separate ways, each to their own box. Kids are often marched through their after school hours, homework, dinnertime, bath time, story time, bedtime, sleep. Often it is only after I have kissed my son’s damp hair as he is drifting off that I realize what I wished I had had time to say, time to do with him, but it is too late…he is off into dreams and all too soon out the door again away from me.

Sometimes however we have moments, rarely whole days but snatches of beauty, of stillness, of laughter to share: My little daughter may have discovered an earthworm and she is just delighted with its wriggling so much like her own. The baby smiles so big that it seems to encompass his eyes, his ears, the top of his head. He has only smiled maybe a hundred times in his whole life and each one is new and fresh and unbelievably precious to me. My son has begun to play a game in which he owns a tea shop and he urges me to stop and buy tea “Only 11 cents” and visit a while. My teenage daughter asks me to sit and talk to her while she soaks in the bath.

These moments are of critical importance because they are the fleeting bits of life that we gather and call memories.

To me, ultimately Hygge is the collection of memories and the creation of new ones, those times that we remember as meaningful only after they have passed.

It is up to me to make a home that is set for memories, that encourages moments, that brings us together. I have made it not only my personal goal but my public one as well. I am working to help families find hygge, find each other, to live…together.

So now I will listen to the birds, the morning coming to life, my own heartbeat. I will have a cuppa and consider myself, the day that lies before me…and all the others that lay behind me now….the ones that brought me here… to this moment. I will breathe.