The Fleeting Moments

There’s the adage, “you don’t know what got til it’s gone,” but there are those moments when you just know a fleeting moment is special…

Eric Renderking Fisk | July 16th, 2018

Pictured above is the last moment of Walt and me in front of his house after taking time off to help him empty out his home office. I asked his wife Barbara to take that photograph because I knew that was the last time the two of us would be there together there in that space. I knew that this was the end of something special and I wanted to make sure that we captured that moment because it won’t ever come again.

His home was a special place for me, it was where he and I would meet up and talk about The Metaphysical Connection and specific episodes, work on the webpage for his Bed and Breakfast, and we even recorded an episode of our podcast there with a special guest.

Over the past winter I was the caretaker, taking the time to check the place out to make sure the furnace was still working, walking around to make sure nobody broke or there wasn’t any damage due to severe weather via the most recent storm. During these quiet moments looking over the house I confronted the nature of time and how fleeting life can actual be.

The thought struck me that this was a special place for countless of special people during the past couple hundred years who must have seen and heard the news of the world during the past two and a half decades while experincing their own phases of life. I wondered about those people were, how they lived their lives, what they must have thought as they saw the world change and evolve and what they must have felt as they experienced their own march through time while being there.

So much life had passed within those four walls that I wondered if that house could have developed a life of its own.

It’s important to remember that while history always matters, the people who count are those of us in our own time and most specifically those of us who are among the living in the here and now. There should be something inside each of us like an internal alarm that wakes us up and lets us know that this is a special moment and that specific instant is something should be cherished as it’s happening.

As I write this, I think about how so many choices led to my chance meeting with Walt and how he became an important part of our lives. My wife and I made seemingly unrelated decisions and choices that led us to move to this specific town, to have children in this specific time in our lives, send them to the school where Walt worked as a behavior specialist, to strike up a conversation about unexplained phenomenon and conspiracy theories, all of which led to our partnership in The Metaphysical Connection.

What if Carol and I turned “left” instead of “right?” Was it fate, and we were destined to be here anyway? Was the cosmos working through synchronicity to bring us to where we were for the right moment in time? Will the same forces work again to bring us to our next stage in life? Who knows… What is important is that we took the opportunities to make something happen.

In the future I’ll pass by this house and think back to all that happened between Walt and I and the role that house had in developing The Metaphysical Connection, and the book Walt wrote, and I eventually reviewed. I’m happy that it had a small part to play in my life and I enjoyed some of the creative energy that resides there, just as I’m delighted for the people who are living there now and now that it’s their time and the moments they’ll have there, too. As I pass by that house, I'll always be thankful for the memories.

I hope that everyone reading this also has a special place like this, and that you also cherish your time there.