Have you ever had a moment where you stopped and realized exactly how good life is sometimes? A moment where you realize that everything seems to be okay, you’re surrounded by people who care, and – check this out – you’re ALIVE, and you FEEL alive.

Those are some of the greatest moments in our lives. Where not only do we realize how incredible life is, but we truly feel alive, happy, healthy, joyous, and any other number of adjectives I could use to describe the feeling. It’s a beautiful thing.

Maybe you feel those moments every day. Maybe you’ve never had a breakthrough moment like that, or maybe you’ve had one just once.

I had one last week, personally. A friend and I were up in Canada, driving around. We went to the mall and the supermarket and bought some snacks and then decided to generally head home, as it was raining and getting late and the mall was closing anyways.

We got stuck at a vertical lift bridge in St. Catharines, Ontario for about twenty minutes. This bridge is pretty incredible, because it’s not one of the ones that simply splits in half to open and allow a barge to pass; a pulley system lifts the entire bridge up in the air.

I’ve been stuck at that bridge before with said friend, but never for that long. It was dark and rainy, and we waited, waited, waited. Eventually the (incredibly huge) barge came along, passed, the bridge came down and we went. But it was such a simple moment like that that made me realize that: holy crap, I’m alive, and I feel alive, this is happening and this is life.

To some, it may sound stupid. But it was a moment that, for some reason, struck me… and it’s moments like that that make you realize how alive you are, and it’s moments like that that make life worth living.