TINY MOMENTS

"There's no hot water," said my Mum as I emerged from my room.

That'll be the power cut then. It's blown out the fuse in the boiler.

Last night, in the middle of music-arranging, the lights went out and the house fell silent. There was a tiny moment when nothing happened at all - we all sat there in the dark, and then my Mum said, "Oh."

I really love those tiny moments. They happen all the time, and I often miss them as they're usually shorter than half a second. But in that half-second, you feel like the world has stopped.

In the end, we found the torch, lit the oil lamp and yanked open the fuse box. We got everything back on except the hot water it seems.

I sometimes catch myself trying to process the tiny moments. The other day during a difficult presentation, one of the managers winked at me as if to say 'keep going, it'll all be alright'. As it happened, the managers pulled my presentation apart as though I'd presented a zebra to some hungry lions. The tiny moment and that microscopic and ludicrous wink had made me smile and helped me through.

There was another tiny moment this week, when I thought I saw something flash across somebody's face - a kind of recognition of a thing unspoken. I thought about it for ages afterwards, trying to work out whether I'd imagined it, or what it could mean.

Then there are those tiny moments of decision - when the balance is tipped one way or the other. I quite like those moments of indecision because the anxiety of them usually forces me to pick a route. I don't want to be a ditherer.

And what about the tiny moments right there in-between cause and effect? An electron jumps between energy levels and out pops a photon. The rest of the world doesn't have a clue what's happened yet. That's a really tiny moment. Then there's a chain reaction, a fuse gets overloaded with power and self-destructs, breaking an electrical circuit. The lights go out. The Intrepids and I sit in darkness for at least a half a second, processing what's happened.

Then just as my brain gets there, the tiny moment ends and my Mum says:

"Oh."

Treasure the tiny moments.