In Kind on Monday: "Insignificant" Moments Can Be the Biggest of All
And a conversation with the Instagram poet who frequently moves us to tears.
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Good On Paper
Words by Leah Melby Clinton
The last handful of years have seen me trying to untangle the knotted connection between things that matter and things that are big. It seems like a curse of sorts, how much we’re inclined to think the flashy and splashy moments are the cornerstones of a live well lived.
The awareness that’s gotten more and more clear to me started small and of its own accord. It might have come to the surface with age or motherhood or, likely, both. But at some point over the last half-decade, I’ve felt a growing awareness of the fact that the little stitches of life are the ones that are most precious and worth remembering.
I thought of it last week when I was making idle small talk with someone. They asked if I’d done anything exciting over the summer, and I rummaged through the past few months, coming up fairly blank. No, I said, we’d done a trip for a family wedding at the beginning, but beyond that it was low-key. Small and simple. Totally ordinary.
The conversation moved on, but my brain registered some defiance. That wasn’t true. Summer was full of special things, like the way my children’s faces delighted over realizing they could stomp on the water jet at the pool to make its neighbor shoot higher toward the sky. There were good movies and glasses of wine; breakfasts with new friends; afternoons where I carved out time to be utterly alone, floating around on an oversized chaise with a magazine. Exciting, all of it, even if not the sort of stuff you’d tell a stranger: “Yes, we flagged the ice-cream truck down once!”
Still, it’s exactly those kinds of moments that I’ve realized hold the key to what I’ve always wanted: something simple and good and made up, block by block, of beauty.
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