The Tribune

By Diane Phillips

It is amazing how the smallest moment can impact a life, the briefest comment influence a decision, the momentary glance disrupt what went before it.

A plane flying smoothly through the air bursts open and a body is partially sucked out as happened Tuesday on a Southwest flight from LaGuardia to Dallas. Where there was once a whole plane was now a plane with a hole.

It happened in a split second because incidents happen in seconds. That’s what they do.

For all the build-up that precedes it, the actual incident is an act that happens so fast you can hardly catch your breath and it’s done. 

A mosquito bites and a child develops malaria.

A sprinter crosses the finish line first, beating his own personal best and winning the gold. A pastor says, “You may kiss the bride”. The doctor says, “One more push” and you hear the cry of the tiny human announcing her way into the world, a sound you think you will always remember (but you don’t). Everything else is prelude.  

In the end, you can break down your life into the smallest parts and I sometimes wonder if we should not try to pay more attention to the parts.

Instead, we think in chunks and say idly, “Where did the time go?” as if time went on a journey, like it just got up one day and left the house, boarded a plane, bus or boat and ran away.

Where DID it go? At least when someone leaves the house we can pretty well trace their steps and count on them returning. But it’s not that way with time.

Once it is gone, it vanishes and we never know the answer to the question, where did it go? We shake our heads and wonder “how can it be almost Christmas already or hurricane season again? The year just flew by”.

Try picturing the year sprouting wings and travelling by air.  

If time earned frequent flyer miles, we’d be talking in the kajillions and time could fly non-stop forever.

The reason time flies is because we are not very good at keeping track of what happens at a given instant.

If we were, we would be obsessed with what we are doing at all times instead of making the most of time. We are caught in a no-win situation when it comes to marking time. If we stop to do it, we stop doing what makes it worth keeping track of.

So we take the easy way out. We do it by calendar instead of by the decisions we make. We mark time with birthdays, anniversaries and special occasions. Lord, help them if our spouses forget one or our children make other plans for Mother’s Day.

A hex will surely be upon them all the next week.

What got me thinking about how we mark occasions instead of the small moments that can lead to a decision that ends up changing the world is a book called The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey.

The book should be in every classroom by the time a student reaches high school not because Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909 but because as a sickly child who could not run and play like many of his friends, he developed a fascination with nature.

He stuffed his pockets with mice, spiders, snakes, any range of small animals and insects he could later study.

That fascination led to his becoming one of the greatest naturalists of all times and under his watch, the greatest boon to what would become America’s famed National Park Service was created (the park service was not officially launched until 1916).

The Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, were among the monuments. There were parks in the Badlands of North Dakota and throughout the Northwest. The once sickly boy created five national parks.

The American landscape looks different because of him. American vacations are different because of him. Memories and experiences are possible because of him. He set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of open space.

He created 18 national monuments, four national game refuges and 51 bird sanctuaries. He wrote reams. He never gave up his passion for adventure and the treasures that he left because of that passion have made it possible for millions every year to see animals in their natural habitat or enjoy a quiet moment by a pond.

One man’s passion led to a world of wonders at the Grand Canyon alone where visitors gaze, stay for days, zipline or walk the sky bridge 4000 feet above the 270 million year-old canyon floor below.

If that had not been preserved more than a century ago, what would be the chances of its being preserved today for the six million visitors who saw it last year?

This was not meant to be about the Grand Canyon where I have never been but am somehow comforted by the fact of its existence and the knowledge that man cannot mess with what nature created thanks to a single man who was once a boy who couldn’t play like others. A boy we might have dismissed as weird or a nerd.

What kind of 12-year-old comes back from a summer vacation and donates mice, a bat, a turtle, four birds’ eggs and the skull of a red squirrel to the Museum of Natural History?

What this little piece of writing was meant to be about was two lessons we can all take from the somewhat unhappy story of a troubled Teddy Roosevelt.

The first is the obvious – every one of us, whether we are like those around us or not, has something that makes us tick and when we are true to our inner passion, we can make a difference.

It may not be the difference a Teddy Roosevelt made. But it could ease the pain of hunger or make life a little easier for someone who was sleeping on the sidewalk.

We don’t need to be like others. We can be who we are so long as the who we are will leave the world a better place and we can accept that our contribution is more important than our popularity.

The second is coming back to where we started, how the smallest moment can impact a life.

Teddy Roosevelt remembers the one that changed his.

He was a kid walking along Broadway in New York City on his way to buying strawberries at the market when he passed a dead seal that had been plucked from New York harbour and placed on a plank.

It was the largest dead animal he had ever seen. He got a cloth measuring tape and wrote down the measurements. “That was the day I became a naturalist,” he said.

As an old man, Roosevelt still recalled the moment his destiny was forged. We may not be so clear, but then again we might surprise ourselves.

We will probably do what we always do, hope someone remembers Mother’s Day or our birthday, but it would not be such a bad thing to try to remember the moment we discovered and defined ourselves. And maybe that would bring on an unexpected smile.