Composing a Life: The Art of Curating Your Own Moments

We were sitting around the table — just me and my two adult children — celebrating a second, small, private Thanksgiving together. Just us and a meal we curated intentionally: a collection of our most beloved dishes from our history as a family.

At some point in the conversation, we started laughing about how we each approach food completely differently.

One son is obsessed with texture — how something crunches, melts, snaps, or dissolves on the tongue.
My other son is devoted to flavor — the nuance, the layering, the surprise of an ingredient that makes the whole bite light up.

And me? I realized that my lens has always been composition.

Not just the flavor.
Not just the texture.
But how an entire meal fits together.
How one bite sets up the next.
How the contrast or complement of components create an experience that moves through the senses like a small symphony.

We realized, together, that this wasn’t accidental.

My passion for food — sensual food, intentional food, food as memory and art — shaped them. They inherited my relationship to presence at the table, even if they express it through different senses.

And as we sat there, I recognized something about myself I’ve known but never named:

I don’t just make meals.
I compose experiences.

I always have.

Before I knew myself as an Erotic Mystic, before I knew pleasure as a frequency, before I ever guided someone into sensation or aliveness or remembrance...

I was an illustrator. A visual storyteller — and composition was my native tongue.
I learned how a single shift in placement, color, contrast, or negative space could change the entire emotional experience of the viewer.

It didn’t stop at drawing. I later used composition as a writer and creator — in comic books, video games, film, and fiction.

I wasn’t just writing stories.
I was composing the reader’s experience:
-what they saw first,
-what they felt next,
-what tension built beneath the surface,
-what epiphany hit them at the exact right moment.

I was composing worlds. Composing transformation. Composing the emotional symphony of a character’s journey long before I knew I was doing the same with my own.

And sitting with my sons at Thanksgiving, it hit me:

Composer and composition share the same root.

I always thought I lacked the talent for music — but maybe that was never true.
Maybe I’ve been composing all my life.
Just not in the domain of sound.

I compose in sensation.
-in memory.
-in experience.
-in the symphony of a night, a meal, a room, a life.

Once I saw this, it was impossible to unsee.

I’m trying to impress anyone or strive for perfection.

Composition is a devotional practice for me.
It’s how I honor the moment, how I create beauty and memory.
It’s how I say: you matter, this moment matters, life matters.

This is how I love the people in my world.
It’s how I love myself.

People often think “composition” is elaborate — aesthetic, theatrical, curated to the point of effort.
It doesn’t have to be.

Composition can be subtle.

-Choosing a bowl that feels good to hold.
-Putting on music that matches your mood instead of numbing it.
-Lighting the room in a way that softens your edges.
-Arranging your dinner plate so it feeds your eyes and not just your hunger.
-Taking five seconds to arrive in a moment before rushing into the next one.
-Placing a single fresh ingredient on the plate because beauty feeds you.
-Changing the texture of your day with scent, color, taste, or fabric.

This is what I mean when I talk about composing life. Not extravagance but about awareness. Choosing to inhabit the moment so fully that the moment becomes art.

It’s about saying: I am worth creating beauty for.

Memory doesn’t archive everything equally. It remembers impact — moments that held shape, color, contrast, intention, sensation.

Composition creates impact.

It creates the kind of memory your future self returns to for nourishment and grounding and inspiration.
It accumulates over time, turning an “ordinary life” into a vibrant, turned on one.

Most people don’t realize this: Life doesn’t become meaningful by accident. It becomes meaningful through composition.

Through the way we place ourselves inside our days.
Through the way we shape our environments.
Through the way we choose beauty when we don’t have to.
Through the way we enter a moment with presence instead of speed.

You don’t need hours or elaborate rituals. You need a shift of attention.
A willingness to craft.
A devotion to the texture of your own experience.

Here’s what I want to leave you with:

Compose one moment today.
Just one.

It can be a meal, a morning, a cup of tea, a bath, a stretch, a breath, a single transition in your day.

Give it intention.
Give it beauty.
Give it a sensory anchor.

Make the moment something your future self will remember because of how it made you feel.

And let that be enough.

Because your life — your real, lived, embodied life — is worth composing.

And because the world becomes more beautiful every time you choose to create beauty inside yourself.

In devotion and design,
-Sharon Marie Scott