Jae L. Ross, Assistant Attending Psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, shared on LinkedIn:
”Have you ever been unexpectedly moved by an ordinary moment, and struggled to explain why?
It happened to a patient of mine, and it became a question worth sitting with. My newest reflection, Ordinary Moments, is an invitation to notice the life already unfolding in front of us.
Ordinary moments
‘I don’t know why I cried.’
A patient said this to me not long ago.
She described an afternoon sitting outside with her family, watching the children play. Nothing remarkable had happened. It was one of those ordinary afternoons that unexpectedly become beautiful while we’re living them.
Without warning, tears came to her eyes. A family member noticed and asked what was wrong.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I just want more moments like this.’
Her family knew she had recently finished treatment, so they assumed she was worried the cancer would return. That she was afraid she might not live long enough to have more afternoons like this. So they tried consoling her, telling her not to think that way. That the cancer was behind her and she’d have many more days with the family.
In trying to reassure her, they unintentionally dismissed that afternoon as just one of many ordinary days still to come. They didn’t see what she was seeing.
She tried to explain that she wasn’t worrying about the future or grieving the past. She found herself emotional in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and couldn’t understand why.
When she came to see me, that became her question.
‘Why did I feel that way?’
Have you ever been surprised by your own emotional response to an otherwise ordinary moment?
One moment you’re watching life unfold as usual. The next, your eyes begin to fill with tears, and if someone asks why, you’re not quite sure what to tell them.
Our first instinct is to search for an explanation. Did something remind me of the past? Am I worried about the future? Much of our emotional life unfolds in those two directions. Our attention drifts backward into memory or forward into anticipation, and our emotions often follow.
But sometimes neither explanation seems to fit.
Sometimes our attention hasn’t wandered at all – it has settled more deeply into the present. That was what intrigued me about my patient’s question. She wasn’t looking backward into memory. She wasn’t looking forward with fear.
Which left me wondering whether her attention had settled somewhere else entirely.
Have you ever noticed what happens when you finally slow down enough to fully attend to the moment in front of you? You notice details you might otherwise miss.
The children’s laughter screeching through bright, open smiles. Their bodies tumbling across the grass with an almost naive abandon.
The warm grip of another’s hand in yours, holding on as if to say you’re not alone. The way afternoon light settles across a familiar room, illuminating its parts differently as the shifting angle of the light passes through.
Nothing about the moment has changed, yet somehow your experience of it has.
Perhaps that’s because attention doesn’t merely help us notice more. It allows us to receive more.
The moment itself hasn’t become richer.
Our participation in it has.
And sometimes, when we participate that fully, we are moved in ways we can’t immediately explain.
Perhaps that was what happened with my patient that afternoon. She slowed down long enough to fully receive an ordinary moment. And in doing so, she experienced its extraordinary meaning.
Cancer has a way of bringing certain truths into the foreground.
Not new truths. Ancient ones.
That time is finite. That nothing is promised. That ordinary days are, in fact, extraordinary.
None of these truths began with cancer. They’ve always belonged to life itself. Most of us have the luxury of keeping them in the background.
Cancer has a way of rearranging our attention so that certain truths become more difficult to overlook.
We speak of ‘stopping to smell the roses’ as though it’s little more than sentimental advice. But it isn’t new advice, or small advice. It’s an old truth we keep forgetting because our attention is always being pulled somewhere else. Ordinary moments are where life is actually happening. We forget to give them the attention that lets their extraordinary nature show itself.
Sometimes it takes a profound interruption to remember what we’ve always known.
I don’t believe cancer teaches wisdom. No one should have to suffer in order to become wise. But I do believe cancer can reveal truths that ask something of us.
The wisdom comes later. It comes from what we do with what those truths reveal.
Maybe that’s why some people find themselves unexpectedly moved by an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
Not because they’re worried there might not be other ordinary Tuesdays to come. Not because they’re grieving a past to which they might not return.
But because they are fully present to something they might once have hurried past.
And perhaps those tears aren’t asking to be explained. Perhaps they’re an invitation-to notice, before something life-altering opens your eyes to it, that the afternoon you’re living now is one of the extraordinary ones. The people beside you. The light in the room. A warm hand in yours.”
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