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On a cold winter evening in 1993 I was walking home late through a quiet residential street in Winnipeg when it started to snow. The sky was the perfect blend of dark pregnant grey, with a soft underbelly of street lamp orange. It was cold, but there was absolute stillness. It was the kind of cold you appreciate as a relief from the punishing, breathless cold of a prairie winter. And then, in that perfect, dark stillness… it began to snow. The biggest, fattest, flakes parachuting from the heavens in perfect silence. A miraculous surprise invasion of a million falling angels. In moments everything was covered with a thick blanket of white newness which further muffled the distant noise of late city traffic. I knew it was just snow, but the combination of the weather, the sky, the stillness, the solitude, the random beauty, made me feel uniquely human and profoundly alive.

That moment changed my life: staring up into the infinite white depth of precipitation, catching chip-sized flakes in my open mouth, I wanted to capture the feeling of that moment forever. I wanted to share that feeling of happy alone-ness, that moment of peace, as it was happening. I wanted the world to hear my emotions, to see what I was feeling.

This video of moments, created by Will Hoffman, reminded me that my vision has come true. Smart phones with mobile data plans, a lifestreaming app, and a Twitter account have made ‘limited global telepathy’ a reality less than 15 years later. Everyone can share their moments. They can capture them, catalogue them, edit them, review them. They can publish them, discuss them, rate them, organize them, aggregate them. Sometimes this is just noise, but sometimes it is a profound combination of events that make you feel infinite and human and alive.

Thank you for sharing your moments, Will Hoffman.

[See more of Mr. Hoffman’s genius at http://www.anyoneeverything.com.]