MY EUREKA MOMENT

What was the original eureka moment?

It is said that the legendary scientist of antiquity, Archimedes, was so thrilled with his discovery of the principle of buoyancy and the related concept of water displacement while taking a bath, that he leapt out of the tub and ran naked down the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka!” (“I have found [it]” in Ancient Greek.)

Our potpourri of defining eureka moments veers from the small scale to the dramatic. But all share the power to spark clear realizations with consequences that alter the trajectory of our lives.

In “Moving Away From the Cliff’s Edge: A Mum’s Story of Her Child’s Mental Health,” our writer, emerging from COVID lockdowns, is giving her son a lift in the car, when his casually-uttered sentence thrusts her into a viscerally-felt realization that he is grappling with suicidal thoughts. In her retelling, “I Told my Mother About Gurdjieff,” Liba Chorny, 95, recalls a

subtle moment, decades earlier, when she confessed an interest in alternative spirituality to her old-school mother, exposing a chasm between them.

There’s more. An American woman regains her self worth when she surprises her husband and herself by conversing in fluent Korean with muddled tourists at a US gas station. A parched poet visits a Pakistani slum and struggles with clashing feelings of revulsion and relief when offered cool water in a dirty glass, before grasping that “We all share the same night.” A homeless man’s grandson knows he must come to his aid, and comply with his elder’s knightly fantasy to do so. A tender man holds twin babies and contrasts their magical sweetness with our fraught world, and a young Bruneian opts to run his self-criticism into the ground, literally.

Read on to experience our writers’ pivotal moments of self discovery in The Sentinel’s “My Eureka Moment” Series.