I’ve been raking my brain for a while, but it seems I’m too much of a stoic.

Was forced out of my rental at short notice (barely within the confines of law) because the landlord’s son got out of jail and she wanted to move him in. No advance notice, of course.

This forced me into a situation where I had roommates from hell. For approximately two weeks. Then said roommate called the electrician for something minor and one thing led to another and the house was condemned.

So I had to move twice in two weeks. That really sucked

EDIT: oh shit I read that as WORST moving experience, not most lol. I’ll leave this here for posterity I guess

Probably when I moved houses. The removalists were great by the way!

A friend of mine was once the organist at a cathedral with a grand pipe organ. He invited me to see it one day and hear him play, and for the finale he had me climb up into the forest of towering pedal pipes, crouching between the rows, dwarfed by their looming height, while he played Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

The sound hit me like a wave, so vast and tremendous and perfect. I felt utterly annihilated - tiny and shaken apart into nothing, a speck swept away in a cascading ocean of music, like the whole world was exploding in cataclysm and fractal rebirth all around me. Dazzling and enormous.

And when the fugue began, I think that’s the closest to nirvana I’ve ever been. Just blown clean off the face of the earth.

One thing that comes to mind and that sticks out, because it’s not something that I expected:

Google Earth has a VR mode.

There is an intro “animation”, where you get teleported to various landmarks. From cities, to deserts to mount everest.

But at the end, it places you into space, with the earth in front of you. Basically in touching distance.

It was a moment of pure, unexpected overview effect.

I basically just stood there for what must have been a minute at least and was very much not expecting such an emotion

A few weeks after I had a huge argument with my mom, The Beths released a song called Mother Pray for Me. I listened at work and almost cried then. A few months later my brother had a spare ticket to their concert and they played it at the show and I lost it.

I lived in Orlando when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened. I also used to work in the arts and was transitioning into a different industry when it happened. In the days following the shooting, every arts organization in the area contacted each other about putting together some kind of tribute. They asked me to stage manage it. There was next to no rehearsal time, so many opportunities for people to get self-conscious and let their ego take over (and there’s no shortage of that in the arts), and everything just… came together. My boss volunteered to be my assistant for the day, because titles didn’t matter and everything was about making this beautiful offering to the community to help process what had happened. Anytime someone would ask, “would you consider trying this crazy thing?” the answer was always, “Absolutely. We can do that.” Local companies donated supplies. World-renowned artists shared the stage with virtual-nobodies, and everyone was so earnest and genuine in the offering they wanted to make to their community that there just wasn’t room for anything except the very best of every person. No one knew how it was going to turn out, and the fact that it ended up being perfect was a testament to everyone’s trust, talent, and courage. It was the most stunning display of collective selflessness I’ve ever witnessed.

It’s a real three-way tie for me.

Growing up my parents sucked. Like hard core. Nothing I did was ever good enough not even performing tour on violin, robotics competitions, or being part of honors society. I lived my childhood doing everything they expected and nothing I wanted. On top of dad being physically abusive and my mom making us children compete for the privilege of her saying we were the favorite child for the week, you can imagine I was pretty screwed in the head.

So at age 20 I’d had enough.

My college roommates thankfully stepped up big time and got me the help I needed. Sitting in the psych ward after,being held by someone who genuinely cared about me as I heard someone say they’re proud of me for the first time in my life. I’m many, years older and still almost turn into a blob of tears thinking back on it.

This led to the other big moving experience. As part of my recovery and road to figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be I decided to listen to a friend, go out on a limb, and go to a Mumford and Sons concert for myself instead of letting them pass by while I kept doing only what others wanted of me. I don’t remember much of the concert, but I remember standing there, realizing I was just a body in the crowd and seeing all the smiling faces around me, their voices washing over me, the music carrying me along. I just remember realizing that I don’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things and I’m free to do what I want.

So yeah, those or the time my doc accidentally mixed up my meds and gave me effectively an acid trip are my most moving experiences.

A friend of mine and her husband were expecting twins, but the viability of the pregnancy was uncertain. They were warned there might be complications, but they hoped and prayed through to delivery.

The twins were born (two girls), but one of them immediately had some complications. She was moved to the NICU and the doctors weren’t sure if she’d pull through. She showed signs of improvement and fought her little heart out for those rough first few weeks.

After a month, things were looking more positive. But then she suddenly took a turn for the worse, and within a few days she passed.

A funeral for an infant is one of the most heart-wrenching experiences I have ever known, especially for a child who has been alive long enough for the parents to develop a stronger bond. This baby had bonded particularly strong with her dad (her sister seemed to favor her mom). So when the dad was invited to share words if he wanted, he walked up to the tiny casket and sang a lullaby while he wept.

And every person in the room wept with him. The guests, the minister, the funeral director. I’ve never experienced sadness like it.

This isn’t moving in a happy way at all, I’m gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

I’m a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I’d already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I’d heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

It’s not a story I tell very often, not that I’m particularly traumatized by it and don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there’s not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I’ve taken have.

I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I’d never heard before, and I’d heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I’m not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there’s confusion, and fear, it’s a cry for help, it’s a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

It’s a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it’s kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I’d heard before even if I didn’t quite know what it was yet.

It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that’s really hard to explain.

It’s a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn’t real, you can’t un-learn it, and once you have, it’s sad because there’s a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there’s also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

It was the first time I heard it, it wasn’t the last, and I’m sure I’ll hear it again. I’ve heard it from women, I’ve heard it from men, I’ve heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn’t always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

It doesn’t come with every call I’ve had where a loved one has died, and I won’t claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

Maybe it seems a bit mundane, but I was moved to tears watching the live footage of the Artemis reentry shot out of the window. It’s an unedited 25 minutes of visuals and sounds that the astronauts saw and heard as they returned to Earth, and it has some of the most beautiful “real” things recorded for all to see.

Between the gorgeous blue planet and blackness of space you see the fiery reentry and flakes of spacecraft burning off into the distance as the capsule makes a mind-bending descent into the atmosphere. The video includes live telemetry about speed and G forces, as well as all the sounds of the maneuvering thrusters doing an algorithmic dance to keep the angles exactly as they need to be

It’s one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen, and makes me proud of all humanity has achieved.

Worth a watch!

The Wisconsin Act 10 protests in 2011. That was when newly-elected governor Scott Walker sprung a surprise bill to gut public sector unions. There were many moving moments: Protests of nearly 100,000 people at the State Capitol; the day that farmers brought their tractors for a “Pulling Together” protest; watching people on their hands and knees wiping down the stone floors of the occupied Capitol to protect them from winter grit people tracked in; seeing the board at Ian’s Pizza recording the geographic origins of donations to feed the protesters as it grew to include all 50 states, and then the world, even Egypt and Tunisia (the Arab Spring was going on, too).

But weirdly, the most moving to me was the day that the firefighters joined in. I was at the Capitol early in the protests, when it felt tentative, driven by the graduate student union, uncertain of wider support. Then word spread through the crowd: The firefighters were coming. This was exciting, because the Act spared public safety unions, so it didn’t directly affect them.

But, they didn’t just join the crowd. No, the firefighters came marching in the doors in formation, led by bagpipers making a glorious din, in full regalia, and carrying union banners. They stood at attention in the rotunda while the pipers played, and made goddamn sure that everybody knew that they were in this fight, including the governor and legislators who would hear it from their offices, and let it be known that they had the backs of the other unions. Solidarity!

Man on his deathbed that I’m not related to told how much they respect me as a person had me struggling holding myself together. Apparently I even struggle writing about it.

EDIT: By far not the most, but I thought it was worth sharing

I’ll have to dig it up again but it was a video with voiceover showing how a stray dog was burying her dead pup using her only her snout.

She dug out a spot gently using her front legs without kicking the dirt back, carefully placed the dead pup gently into the hole, and then slowly buried it by pushing dirt with her snout repeatedly until the hole was filled.

The voiceover was just explaining that dogs typically dig by kicking their front legs to launch the dirt behind them, and vice versa for filling holes by turning around and kicking in the opposite direction. But for the dead pup, the dog intentionally chose to use her snout to cover the hole.

It could have been any other cheesy social media forward, but it was pretty interesting to see how a mother dog treats her dead pup with respect and visual sadness in her facial expression.

There was this guy who started college when I was chairman of the study association for IT. He was a bit of a geek even by IT standards, but all in all okay guy who brought a lot of enthusiasm.

He was never really understood by his surroundings, had a tough childhood with some trauma. Went into special needs schools and working his way up to study IT at a good school. He was like 26 when he started, the more usual age being 18 or even 17.

He was of course always welcome at our study association and everyone accepted him for who he was. He ended up also doing board work for the study association.

Couple years later, I’d already graduated, we met at a general meeting for the association and afterwards he took me apart to say that he’d graduated. He said that it was because of me giving a speech to all first-years that he’d felt more or less at home, felt confident enough to join the association, found friends and that that helped him get his diploma. He said it was because of me he got where he was.

I told him it was not because of me. He got to college before even meeting me. I was just there along the way to nudge him, unknowingly, towards a group of positive people who were always happy to help.

He’d had tears in his eyes and I have him a quick hug. I then told him this study association did a lot of good for me too. Sometimes all you need to do is step into something to generate great change in your life.