Seed Proustian Moments In Your Child

Those little moments can be precious for your child

Proustian moment, termed after the French writer Marcel Proust, is rather an ordinary moment (one that is part of your daily life), that accidentally awakes your senses to a kind of goodness inherent in that moment which was always there every time, though you couldn’t quite recognize it.

For Marcel Proust — as written in his novel, In Search Of Lost Time, which was more of a narration of his own life — it was a moment of eating the madeleine dipped in hot tea after a period of being depressed and sad; the moment or rather the taste evoked a memory of his childhood — while spending the summers in his aunt’s house, she used to feed him with madeleine dipped in tea — that he being a child was able to immerse in the simple pleasure or good-enoughness of that moment.

He was able to snap out of his depressed mood, for the powerful inspiration he magically gathered from that simple moment.

In the words of Marcel Proust:

…I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a piece of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake-crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me…I had ceased to feel I was mediocre, contingent, mortal. Where could it have come to me from — this powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I grasp it?

You never know, that an ordinary moment with your child, such as feeding him a biscuit dipped in tea in the evening as the sunlight had softened up its intensity, might have the potential to create a powerful impression in your child regarding his innate ability to appreciate an ordinary moment and derive a source of inspiration from it.

Years later down the road when stuck in a bad mood, he may be able to involuntarily travel back to that moment he spent with you, and gather fresh energy to snap out of the mood.

Complete the above with this poem:

I had written a bit more on Proustian Moment here :