I feast fairly regularly on a hearty diet of Food Network and Cooking Channel. With the exception of that weird Baron Ambrosia program I’ve not yet been able to embrace, there really isn’t a show that I won’t watch.

Earlier today, I was watching Robert Irvine bark a few (understatement?) orders as he endeavored to give a failing restaurant a new lease on life. He said something on the episode that’s so true. He called life a sequence of moments, saying that when the moments and the sequence is just right, life is magical.

Life is, indeed, a sequence of moments. Some are good, some are bad, some leave us feeling indifferent, enraged, inspired — even insane at times.

We go through life trying to create the perfect string of events that leads to a perfect existence that makes us feel like we have the perfect everything. And yet we inevitably fall short — sometime, somewhere, even if we only feel that way for one moment. I think it’s because we try so hard that we forget to let the moments come to us.

We forget that there can be something good in the bad — and even something bad too much good. Not always, but sometimes. There’s nothing wrong in trying to create our ideal world and surrounding ourselves with everything we want to be surrounded by. But, for me, missing the moments — the seemingly insignificant, the mundane, the random, the quirky and the chaotic — means missing some of the best stuff in life…stuff that I can pick and choose and bring back into my world to make it a little better than before. Not perfect, but better.

Tonight I am thankful for the reminder to be in every moment and to try to see every instance as something that can add substance to my life. And maybe even a little magic.