If You Could

People fascinate me. All my life I’ve loved blowing past the surface level at Mach speeds, to get to what really makes a person tick. The best way to do this: questions, but they have to be the right questions. How many siblings someone has, what town they grew up in, or what their birthday is won’t tell you who they are. Because of this I have a bit of a reputation for asking people things they wouldn’t expect, especially when I’ve just met them. Some of the classics include: If you could have any superpower of your choosing how would you use and abuse it? If soulmates existed, what do you think yours would be like? And if you were on death row, what would you choose as your last meal? A friend from high school answered that last one with mac n’ cheese, and I’ve never looked at him the same.

Recently while talking with a friend one of these questions came up; What one moment would you most want to live out? It could have been anything, winning a gold medal at the Olympics, walking a red carpet for a lifetime achievement award, going on a cocaine bender with Hunter S. Thompson – anything. It was a question designed to compress a person’s desires, ambitions, and condense them into a single concentrated moment of bliss, and it did just that. Then they turned it on me.

Shit.

Now I have no problem talking about myself, much to my introverted parents’ confusion, I have always been a social butterfly. Even to this day I use the same social tactics I did on my first day of kindergarten, which consist of asking “do you want to be friends?” and after getting a yes telling that poor person everything that I have ever found remotely interesting. Did you know whales used to walk on land? They still have toes in their fins! All that being said I wasn’t sure how to answer my own question, not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I had two.

The first is straight forward enough. Two impossibly loud sounds compete for dominance as the roar of the crowd collides with screaming engines of the race cars as they snake through the narrow streets of Monte Carlo. I come out of the tunnel, and light breaks on a tarocco orange McLaren flying up to the Nouvelle Chicane. It’s the seventy-eighth lap and I’m in the lead. The last few turns are smooth, and I cross the finish line, champion of the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix. A rich and beautiful city jammed well beyond capacity watching as I take that top step on the podium, shaking and spraying the runners up with champagne like Carrol Shelby did at Le Mans all those years ago. What could be better than that?

Maybe one thing. It’s a Sunday morning and sunshine streams past the curtains into an old red-brick industrial loft, clothes from the day before are strewn across a Herman Miller Eames lounge chair in the corner of the room. Before I can rub the sleep from my eyes a pillow comes crashing down on my head followed by the squeals and laughter of two young children, my children, as they beat me mercilessly into consciousness. One boy, one girl, a set of twins. They’ve got my dad’s black hair, but their straight and slender noses come from someone else. She’s standing in the doorway, her long hair that starts brown and gradually turns blonder pulled up in a messy bun, the two strands she never gets dangling at the sides of her face. Holding a cup of coffee that fills the bedroom with its scent, watching the massacre. There’s a ring on her left hand, the one that used to be my grandmothers. I don’t have anywhere else to be, nowhere I’d go even if I did.

Now that I’ve answered my own question, I need to ask myself why I value these moments so much. Is it because I’m an egotistical idiot who wants to subject his body to ridiculous G-forces and overall risk just for momentary glory? Do I want the second because I’m too fixated on outdated patriarchal ideals? Am I just a big softie who loves rom-coms?

Probably.

When looking at it, I think my answer addresses my own duality. There is a side of me that wants to live selfishly, pursuant of personal validation and glory, but even if that is the knee-jerk desire, the quiet contented bliss ultimately wins out for me.

In the end it’s just a nice way of visualizing what it is you want to strive for within your own life. So, if you could live out any moment (or maybe two) what would you choose?