When the Moment Is Mine

I want a moment when the life I have lived and the person I have become finally feel as though they belong together. When I can stand somewhere and recognise what it has taken to get there, while feeling that there is still something ahead of me I want to reach. I want to know that I am there, in my own life, while it is happening.

It could be a conversation, a decision or something I have hoped for becoming real. From the outside, it might look like very little. What would matter to me is the feeling inside it: that I am able to meet what is happening as myself, without having to explain the whole journey first.

There is a longing in that which I want to take seriously. I want to do things that matter to me. I want to love, to make something of the possibilities I have, to discover what I can become when there is room to choose. I want a moment when I can feel those hopes reaching into the life I am actually living.

The life that brought me here

I was born in Poland and grew up mainly in Sweden. My life has crossed countries and languages, and those places remain part of how I understand myself. Yet some of the changes that shaped me began before I understood what was changing.

When I left Poland as a child, I did not understand that my life would continue in Sweden. I thought I was going away for a while. There were adults making decisions, a journey taking place and a future I could not yet imagine. I was living through something whose meaning would take me much longer to understand.

That is part of what I think about when I think about choice. Before I could decide much about the direction of my life, I was already on my way somewhere. Looking back, I can see how much a person may have to live through before they have the words to say what it meant.

I know something about being afraid that a mistake could cost me my place. I have written about that fear as I remember it from childhood. When I think about the person I want to be now, I also wonder who I can become when there is enough safety to stop making every decision around what I might lose.

I would like to discover more of that person. What he enjoys. What he hopes for. What he might say when he has time to find his own words. There is something moving to me about the possibility that, after everything that has already happened, there is still more of myself to meet.

What I want to carry with me

I want to bring my history into that moment honestly. Some things remain difficult to understand. Some memories are painful. There are also people whose kindness mattered, things that delighted me and curiosity that belonged to me even when much of my life was being decided elsewhere.

I want the good to remain visible when I tell the truth about the difficult parts. I want to remember the person who cared, the child who wanted to understand how something worked, the moments when the world gave me something to be curious about. Those things belong in the account of how I became myself.

And I want room for the choices I make now. If I try to understand someone before judging them, or manage to speak with care when I am upset, that matters to the life I am building. I do not need to turn it into a great achievement. I need to notice that I have some part in deciding what continues through me.

There is something important to me about kindness that is chosen with an understanding of how much its absence can hurt. I would like my experiences to make me more attentive to another person. I know that wanting this does not mean I will always manage it. It gives me a direction I can return to when I get something wrong.

Perhaps an important part of becoming myself happens there, in choices that attract very little attention. How I respond when someone needs patience. Whether I listen long enough to hear something I had not considered. What I do with the power I happen to have in a situation. I want to recognise myself in those decisions, including when nobody else will know what they required.

You will have choices

When I imagine the younger me seeing my life now, I wonder what he would recognise. There would be places and possibilities he could not have pictured. There would be things I would struggle to explain to him, because I am still trying to understand them myself.

But I know something I would want him to hear: you will have a life, and there will be choices in it that you cannot see from where you are now.

I would want to say that gently. I would want him to have something to look towards without asking him to understand everything that would happen on the way. He would not need a finished account of the man he would become. Perhaps it would be enough to know that he would have a say in more of his own life.

That possibility means a great deal to me. So does the thought that another person might reach a point where something becomes available that was once beyond them. In Change the Circumstance, Not the Person, I wrote about the kind of help I hope to offer: something practical that gives a person more room to decide.

I want to leave the decision with them. Perhaps the life they choose will be different from the one I imagined. I would still be glad that they could consider it. There is something deeply human in wanting another person to have a chance, especially when I cannot know everything they have carried to reach it.

And when I return to my own life, I recognise the same wish. I want enough room around a decision to hear what I actually want. I want to be able to choose something because it matters to me, with care for the people it affects, and know why I am saying yes.

When the moment is mine

Perhaps that is what the moment would hold. The person I was would still belong to me. So would the things I have learned, the people I have cared about and the hopes I have yet to put into words. For a little while, I would be able to feel all of that without needing to defend it.

In that moment, I want to feel free enough to choose without first preparing a defence of what I want. To hear my own answer and trust myself enough to act on it. I want to feel that the person I have been trying to become and the person standing there are, at that moment, the same person.

This life is mine. These decisions are mine.

I want those words to include the life I actually have. The beginning I did not choose, the things I am grateful for, the decisions I would make differently and the people who have mattered along the way. I want to be able to say them with that whole history still present, knowing that there is room in the story for what I choose next.

Tomorrow I may doubt myself again. I may get something wrong or meet a circumstance I do not know how to handle. That would leave me with more to understand. It would not make the moment less real. I would still have known what it felt like to be there, fully enough to want to stay.

I think that is what I am hoping for: a moment I can recognise while I am inside it. To feel the distance I have travelled, and the possibility that there is more ahead. To know that the life continuing from here has room for my choices, my care and the things I still want to become.

And when that moment has passed, I would like to carry it with me too. There may be days when I need to remember it. Days when knowing that I have felt at home in my own life, even briefly, helps me believe I can find my way there again.