The Best Part

Another Endless Moment... and What Comes Next

My son says I should write a book called The Best Part. I ask him why and he shrugs, saying: “Dunno. Just thought it.” The thought disappears, and we continue walking round the track. Another twist in a loop that never ends, a spontaneous idea that is soon disappeared into something else. 

Photo by Tim Hüfner on Unsplash

All the world’s religions talk about a life after this one, something better to come, a world beyond our flesh-and-blood one. But we don’t know. We believe. We think. But no one knows. At least, no one I know. 

We all get hints of a more that might be—but that is all. In these moments, there is an invitation begging to be noticed, and we can either worry about it or wake up. We can give into the fear that says what we have is not enough, that there is more to be needed. Or we can start to see.

There is no insufficiency here, no incompleteness beyond the one we create. In this time and place called the present, a yearning is born, and it calls to us like the crying of an infant. This is life being lived. Every blossoming comes from a willingness to wilt, to let go and be pruned into something else. 

No one owns a photograph of heaven, but every time I open my eyes to see soft hair fallen on a pink pillow beside me, sunlight cutting through our bedroom window, I watch angels descending as dust particles and am sure I must be glancing eternity.

If you pay close enough attention to anything, you start to see everything. Trained eyes recognize a shimmering quality to all of reality. The gossamer wispiness of clouds flying by at four hundred miles an hour. Ruby red sunset saying goodbye to yesterday. Orange flames enveloping the sky. Another ending, a new beginning; and we are almost home. But not yet. 

Now, there is you and me and this champagne toast at thirty thousand feet.

A moment later, we are in our kitchen, listening to teenagers argue about who will take out the trash. There is the melody of a song lingering from the weekend, an echoing somewhere in the back of our brains, remembering what has passed. It is enough to make a person want to sing. There is always more if we want it, more than could ever be enjoyed.

This abundance invites us to greet each moment with renewed sensitivity, to taste what mind can never know. Suppose heaven must be more than a cave drawing or cathedral ceiling, more than a concept. Suppose it must be squeezed and pulled together like Play-Doh, molded and stretched into new shapes every time you touch it. Suppose it is something to be sensed after eyes have shut and new stories emerge.

I want to know what it’s like to fly, to touch clouds with wings unbound. I want to run like the deer in mossy woods with only instinct to guide me. I want to squeeze another slice of grapefruit into your mouth, wondering where everything goes when it soon disappears. This is the best part, the only part, the scene that lives on in a tomorrow we can never know, the not-yet begging for completion.

And here, between the first and last word, the alpha and the omega, there is you and me—a holy nucleus of everything—two pieces merging into a third. Sometimes, what is wants to play as separate: a when and a where that is not here and now. But every attempt to divide the indivisible is like trying to cut up pieces of the wind. All there really is is the next gust, the final few seconds of a song we may choose to inhale or ignore, the shot before the credits, one more endless moment.

And it’s all here, until you make another loop.