When moments are stickie...

I'm sitting at Yoshi's in San Francisco. It's dark and warm; soft beams of light scattered throughout the room fall on small bar tables and silouettes seated around them. My tea is getting cold, the plate of sweets half eaten. Instead, I'm mesmorized by the hands of the bass guitarist on stage. They're not just strumming or plucking, but literally flying on and off the strings in a blurry rush, his fingers hitting, slapping, pounding them with a fanatic energy. Attacked by this madness, his guitar becomes a percussion instrument that produces a sound I've never heard before. In this moment, I disappear -- just utterly melt into the blurry dark warmth...and the sound. For this one moment, this is all there was. It's a moment that makes you realize that something as basic as a sound repeated in a pattern can shake you to the core, like when you suddenly glimpse the bay as you're coming over one of San Francisco's hilly streets, or catch the eyes of a stranger on the street and a million possibilities flash before your eyes, or realize that you've fallen in love without knowing it. And most of all, you realize that you're sharing this moment with every single person in the room, who is sharing it with every other person across the boundaries of time and distance. It doesn't matter that this beat comes from a tradition, philosophy, and way of life entirely different from my own. In this moment, something in me vibrates to the same frequency as the frantic sounds coming from guitar strings.

Then the moment passes, as hurriedly as it washed over me. It leaves behind ripples, to be sure, but I feel these also fading fast. What to do, then, with these earth-shattering moments that sometimes last only a few seconds? How do we hold on to the flittering moments that define us more than the long stretches of time in between, those that hold our lives together?

I look down into my bag, and there is my solution.

We all know and love these (in secret, if not professed publically) -- they come in seemingly endless packets, are a delightful (and trademarked) canary yellow, and are the perfect size to scribble down just about anything on, from one-line self-reminders to words of pure inspiration.

They're stickie notes.

There I see them, a packet of ordinary post-it stickie notes, its light color somehow more inviting than the spotless white of stationary that we're used to, and its small size more forgiving of the imperfection that too often gets brushed aside by lengthy and careful thought. I quickly grab one and scramble to put down a few clumsy words. It doesn't matter if I get it perfectly right; I will never be able to. But there's a freedom in this knowledge, as well as the simple act of the attempt. Stickie notes are how I'm to hold on to this experience, and to similar ones from now on. I will grow these as a body of evidence that attest to moments that move me, to my having the capacity to be moved. This blog, then, will record the "stickie moments" that would otherwise slip through the cracks of a mind too accustomed to expectations of logic and pragmatism.