In the Moment

            Once a year event, once in a lifetime match. April 1^st was Wrestlemania, the WWE’s biggest pay-per-view of the year, and it did not disappoint this year. So many matches that will go down in history, but perhaps the most well known of them all was The Rock versus John Cena. This match was a year in coming, a long year of anticipation building and building to culminate in one of the best matches I have seen in my four short years of watching wrestling.

            As part of both wrestlers’ entrance, there was live music, followed by their entrance theme and that long walk down the ramp. It has always stuck out to me how long the entrance ramp is at Wrestlemania. It’s almost symbolic for the long road wrestlers travel to reach Wrestlemania, to reach that ring set up in the middle of a crowd of 78,000+. When I went to the Carolina Rebellion last May, there were 30,000+ people there and I remember how crowded it was. That just blows my mind and as my friends and I watched The Rock come in, we were all speculating if it didn’t just blow his mind too. Once he and John Cena stood in the same ring together, there were long moments where they looked at each other and at the crowd, taking it all in, soaking up that moment before they got down to business. It got me to thinking, like a lot of things do in all honesty.

            There are a couple of wrestlers who are on my list of people who inspire me. I have no dreams of ever pursuing wrestling, I have no ideals of ever becoming a Diva. That’s not my dream, but they inspire me anyway for one simple reason: they made it. They’ve made it to the big time, some of them coming from absolutely nothing. There’s something powerful in seeing people who have a dream and chased it until their lungs were ready to burst, and they still kept chasing only to grab it with both hands and keep moving. It’s a thought that gets you out of bed in the morning, especially when you’re my age and those dreams are in sight but so far out of reach. Besides that, I believe that there was something in that moment before the match of a lifetime began that we can all learn from.

            A year is a long time to wait, especially with the way they were pushing at each other, even more so over the last few weeks. However, they do not rush to start the match and begin tearing into each other. They did not rush to begin the match of a lifetime, to firmly put their names in the history books as more than a footnote. Almost in spite of the anticipation and build-up, they took a moment to look around, and soak it all in, because it was truly once in a lifetime, like so many moments in all our lives that we take for granted. I heard someone say once that when you get married, no matter what is going on, you should take three moments during the wedding and reception to just stop and soak it all in as much as you can. If you do that, your memories will be rich enough to last a lifetime, because often during these exciting times, it all happens so fast that it becomes a blur in our memories.

            Even now, with the every day living, take a moment to soak it all in, because there has to be some good somewhere, and one day you might miss that good, no matter how small it might have been. Live it up, but also take it in, and maybe you will be able to look back in fifty years and say, I lived a pretty damn good life.