You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

Joni Mitchell sang that memorable line in her 1970 hit, Big Yellow Taxi. In the song, “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” But we all know the meaning goes even deeper.

Maybe it was being at home for a few days, sitting by the fire during the ice and snowstorm, that made me think about how, as we go through our daily lives, we never even know what event or moment or fleeting images will be the ones that we remember years later, the ones that stand out to us looking back, the ones we can remember in such detail it’s as though they just occurred.

We’ve all experienced incredibly uplifting moments that we would expect to stay in our minds forever. The first time I met the woman I would marry and who has been my partner for decades, the first glimpse of my daughter, my first view of the green expanse of the field at Yankee Stadium as I entered the stands, a certain romantic dinner …. You get the idea.

Then there’s the bad moments, the ones you know, as they’re happening, are also going to stay with you forever, even if you wish they wouldn’t. Most of us have more of those than we might like, but that’s part of life, and we all get that idea, too.

Those are the moments—good and bad—we know will always live with us. We expect them to.

But the funny thing is, there’s the ones that are just as vivid, but that are, on their face, so seemingly meaningless we would never expect them to be engraved in memory. Do you know the ones I mean? Very little of consequence appears to have occurred, and yet they’re seared into our minds just as vividly and in as much minute, frame-by-frame detail as the big ones.

There must be a reason those simple moments stay with us. Perhaps they symbolize something deeper.

Maybe it’s our way of acknowledging that every moment has the potential to be special, to be precious—or even that there is something extraordinary in the most mundane moments of our lives, something that resonates within us even if we don’t recognize it for what it is.

Often those simple moments that unexpectedly stay in our memories are brought back through random traces—or, as John Prine called them, souvenirs—things we find many years later that spark our memory: an old restaurant matchbook, a shopping list (I recently found one my mother handed me over 50 years ago, in the pocket of an old coat, and was instantly transported half a century into the past), a pair of cufflinks, a ticket stub, an old Playbill, a note in an old book.

They bring back isolated everyday interactions that appeared to be so ordinary at the time, so routine you wouldn’t expect them to come back to you at all, let alone in such precise detail, like a frozen frame in a movie, preserved and replayed in your mind in living color. Often, playing that scene back even seems to give me insights into it—a better or deeper understanding of what was happening than I had at the time.

So I try to cherish, or at least be aware, of the moment I’m living in.

I can’t do it all the time or even most of the time, but I do it more than I did before. I try to be conscious of how precious and valuable each interaction is, each moment with a loved one or a casual friend or even a stranger. Each and every moment, no matter how mundane, is unique. It will never come again.

Maybe 90% of life is unexceptional, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.

I’ll never be able to totally live in the moment as the popular mantra recommends (and I don’t like popular mantras), but I’ll do my best to recognize the moment I’m living in, while I’m living in it. Each one is fleeting, but together they make up a life. My life.

And, someday, when that moment, that seemingly meaningless interaction, is long gone, I may look back on it and be willing to do anything to have it back.

As Simon & Garfunkel sang in Bookends, “Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

Best,
EJ

ejsimon@ejsimon.com