Sniff...

Standing at the sink, in the office kitchenette, washing the dried and crusted remnants of my workday's coffee from my mug, I had a moment.

I'm fascinated by those moments, when the most banal and mundane aspects of daily life suddenly collide with the profound, the mystical, and the transcendent.  They have an instant and unmistakable sense of Tao.  And this was one of those moments.  Standing at the sink, in the office kitchenette, washing a day's worth of old, dried coffee out of my mug, just like I do at the end of every day.  And as I stood there washing, the cleaning lady walked in.  An older, round-ish hispanic woman; really nothing remarkable about her at all, and normally the only emotional response I would've had to her presence would have been my usual feeling of white, liberal guilt at this reminder of my station, and my privilege.  But something else happened this time.  Something new and different.  Something I never could've expected.  Something simple, and ordinary, and yet utterly magickal.

Just a second or so after she entered the room, the gust of air raised by her entrance carried her scent to me, and I was instantly a child.

Ten years-old.

The beach.

A perfect Summer's day.

The sound of distant waves, crashing.  And gulls crying.  And children screaming in joy.

And a feeling I had forgotten.  A feeling of freedom and exhilaration and excitement and happiness that was so overwhelming as to border on the manic.  A feeling of certainty that these glorious moments of delirium were all that mattered.  There was absolutely nothing else to think about, or do, or say; there was but one single, solitary purpose to all existence, and that was to enjoy these moments, as much as we were physically able, for as long as our parents would leave us to it.  These were the best moments of our lives.  And even better, we were completely unaware of that fact.  Freed in the glory of our naivete, we swam away in the joy of "it can only get better from here."

Death and old-age were only abstract ideas, and things that happen to other people, or on TV.  Sex was still an exhilarating mystery, only just beginning to punctuate our daily lives with little electric sparks of sensation.  Work was something grown-ups forced us to do, and was to be avoided at all costs.  Playing was all that mattered.

Playing was the meaning of life.

And then I was back at the sink, in the office kitchenette, still washing the crusted stains of my amphetamine potion off of my mug.  In just a half-second, I had experienced my entire childhood, and then aged twenty-five years.  I wanted to cry.

I have no idea what that scent was.  Presumably, it was the cleaning lady's perfume.  Even now, as I write this, I can't recall the scent to memory; can't remember the sensation of it at all, but only the effect it had on me.  It's faded back into whatever dark corner of my mind in which it has slept for the past twenty-five years.  I don't know where I remembered it from, nor do I have any idea why it reminded me of my childhood, or the beach, or Summer, or the exhilarating freedom of having no responsibility.  And I guess I don't care at this point.

I can't ever go back.  None of us can.  I will never, ever experience those feelings again.  So I have absolutely no choice at this point but to feel incredibly grateful to have been able to experience them again, at all, for even a moment, as I washed my mug in the sink of the office kitchenette.