Vignette - a morning I don't want to forget

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
Albert Camus

I was up at a ridiculously early hour yesterday. I hadn't slept as much as I simply lay in bed staring at the clock, so worried I'd oversleep that I simply avoided sleep entirely.

The two co-CEOs of Research In Motion had quit the night before. The tech world was buzzing and I had been asked to do an early morning interview with Canada AM. It's CTV's flagship morning show, and as much as I've for the most part gotten used to the whole being-on-TV thing, this is television on another level, the best on-air and production talent you can imagine. I was equally jazzed, humbled and honoured.

I quietly moved through the usual preparation. Shower, clothes on, pat the dog, kiss the sleeping munchkins, juice, read, read, read, then out the door. I've done early-morning interviews before, but this one somehow felt different. As I stepped off the porch, I felt as if I was drinking things in in something beyond HD. The air felt particularly crisp, the darkened landscape almost three-dimensional as my now-wide-open eyes took it all in. It had rained the night before, and the ground was still slick, a chilling wind whipping through the now-bare trees. It was weird, but in a good way...I felt so incredibly alive and in the moment.

On the drive down, I pulled up next to someone at a red light. For some reason, the traffic lights reflecting off the road caught my eye. I wondered if the person in the other car noticed it, too, or wondered how something as simple as a traffic light reflecting off of a wet road can seem worthy of attention at this ungodly hour. I felt like I had a secret, that that driver had no idea I was about to do something blindingly cool before most of the rest of the city would even be awake. I didn't even want to blink, didn't want to miss these few quiet moments of an apparently special day when I was going to kick open a few more doors for me and my still-sleeping family. I wiped away a tear, maybe two, because in an instant I knew that this was what "right" felt like.

It's moments like this that you want to stuff in a bottle forever, when you realize you don't know what you did to deserve it, but you're still glad you did whatever it was. Of course, moments don't work that way, and neither do bottles. But that doesn't mean we can't hope to find a better way to freeze the snippets that matter most.

Before long, I slowly drove up the winding road to the studio on the hilltop. The bright lights shone like beacons in the night, signalling a place I've somehow made my own in recent months, a place where I feel like I can turn pretty much every journalistic dream I've ever had into an amazingly fulfilling reality. We all have places where we excel, and this is one of them for me.

I headed inside and handed myself over to the care of a local producer who knows what I need before I even say I need it, and a faraway director who on mornings like this calmly speaks into my ear and won't ever let me drop the ball. Outside of the focused circle of bright light that surrounded me, the rest of the studio was hushed, dark, serene. I closed my eyes, took a breath, and waited for the countdown to hit zero. I was ready.

Your turn: What does "right" feel like to you?