By Jim Miller

Last week I turned fifty, and someone asked me what was the most important thing I had learned in half a century of life. I sighed. Never having been one to make too much of personal landmarks, my response was that this was just another day.

And now that that day and that question are already past, what matters most is the unspeakable beauty of this second as my fingers touch the keyboard, and I breath in and out and listen to the sound of my son singing in the background, my wife talking to the cat, and the birds chirping in the branches of the tree outside my window.

Purple jacarandas.

Bells on the cart of the ice cream vendor.

Stray clouds in blue sky.

A procession of the faithful marching down the sidewalk after church chanting “Hallelujah.”

The smell of the earth after rain.

It’s all here in this present moment.

Everything always dying, always being born.

Of course suffering waits like a tiger and there is pain and horror in abundance. And we are always running faster and faster it seems, chasing after something we know not what. But sometimes we stop–and then there is the fine texture and delicious taste of this sweet, precious, fleeting instant.

That I savor

And adore.

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Jim Miller

Jim Miller, a professor at San Diego City College, is the co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See and Better to Reign in Hell, and author of the novels Drift and Flash. His most recent novel is Last Days in Ocean Beach.

Latest posts by Jim Miller (see all)

• The San Diego Free Press Was a Gift - December 10, 2018
• Democracy Unchained: How to Win the Future - December 3, 2018
• Oligarchy Sucks: Billionaires Are Undermining Our Democracy and Killing the Planet - November 26, 2018