Some lives get counted by big wins and clean dates. Others live on through quieter stuff. A talk you cannot forget. A relative whose everyday role shifted your whole world. A hard stretch that remade you in small ways. An afternoon that felt plain at the time, then later mattered. For Ken Krizan, these smaller bits have added up over a long run.
In the Moment is an anthology. The pieces come from notes and writings he kept for about fifty years. The book does not march through his life in a neat line. Instead, it collects moments, names, recollections, and thoughts that still stick with him. When you read them in order, you can feel a bigger shape behind each piece. It is a view from far back, with questions underneath. What should we hold onto? What can an ordinary human moment teach once time has done its work?
Krizan was born in Nebraska. He grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and went to Washington High School. Later he joined the United States Army during the Vietnam era. He was sent to Germany. After he came back from service, he finished school at the University of Iowa. Then he worked in health science research for over thirty years. Even now, he stays tied to veterans. At the Iowa City VA Medical Center, he has been a patient and also a volunteer.
Those details set the stage. Still, In the Moment focuses on the stretch between the obvious turning points.
A Life Built from Moments
A life can seem neat when you shrink it into a short bio. Place of birth. School. Time in the service. Work. Marriage and kids. Later years.
But most people do not live that way.
Life comes in small pieces. You feel it as it happens, one moment at a time.
Krizan writes with that in mind. His stories often circle back to old memories. Memory has its own rules. It keeps some details and drops others. A big event can turn dim with time. Yet a small thing can stay sharp for decades. Maybe a look from someone. A sound in a room. A scene from childhood. Even a short conversation.
This is what In the Moment is about.
The book sits on family history, remembered moments, and what Krizan has lived through. It does not read like an ad. The strength is in the long view of someone who has had years to notice, care, wait through hard days, and keep learning.
What you get is not only a timeline of his life. It is a try at figuring out why some moments mattered.
When Writing Became a Way Through
Krizan did not start writing just to become an author. For a while, writing was how he handled depression during an important stage of his life.
At first, it was just a release. Later it turned into more than that. It became a way to think things through and to feel some happiness. It also gave him room to express himself.
This shift matters for the feel of In the Moment. Krizan does not treat life only as something to watch from a distance. He writes out of experiences that forced him to look inward.
His interests helped him do that. He spent time with psychology, philosophy, archaeology, and sociology. Those fields shaped how he approached people, death, pain, and the ability to recover.
Over time, his work took on two linked aims. He wanted to understand life. He also wanted to hold onto what he felt was true in his own experiences.
In the end, writing was not only a way to communicate. It turned into a space for testing experience while it was still there.
Family and the Everyday Practice of Love
At the heart of Krizan’s work is family.
For him, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren are not just entries on a chart. They show how the idea of legacy shifts over time. Parenthood and adoption also shaped his view. He began to believe that love does not have to rely on rare heroic moments or big speeches. Most of the time, love is quieter.
It returns again.
It shows up again.
It stays.
It checks in.
Being there counts more than guessing what others need. Affection can be said out loud, not left as a thought.
Krizan’s thoughts point to a simple pattern. Strong bonds are built day by day. In his writing, you can feel the knowledge that life does not hold still. Kids grow. Adults age. New generations appear. Time moves quicker than anyone expects. Even simple days become valuable, since they cannot be held and rerun.
That is why his family writing blends into his wider point in In the Moment: notice what is happening right now.
Curiosity as a Way of Living
Krizan’s curiosity has extended well beyond writing. His interests in languages, nature, psychology, philosophy, archaeology and sociology point toward a lifelong desire to understand the world from more than one direction. That curiosity also connects naturally with his professional career.
For more than thirty years, he worked in health science research at the University of Iowa. Research requires patience. It asks people to observe carefully, question assumptions and recognize that small details can alter understanding.
His literary work is obviously different from scientific research, but a similar instinct can be seen within it.
Krizan observes.
He asks questions.
He returns to evidence, although in his writing that evidence is often memory.
What did this experience teach me?
Why did this person remain important?
Why do I still remember this particular moment?
What does hardship reveal after enough time has passed?
The questions become part of the story.
The Experiences That Test Us
A reflective life does not always feel calm or simple.
Krizan has faced divorce, heavy job duties, destructive floods, and other setbacks that required change. His writing does not present resilience as a showy idea. It does not claim that getting through hard times means you must never feel afraid. For him, resilience looks more subdued.
You keep going.
You handle what is right in front of you.
You shift your approach when you need to.
You continue to move forward, even if it is slow.
The passage about Krizan’s path highlights that same trait. Difficult events arrived through family ties, workplace demands, and destructive floods, but he went on with clear purpose and consistent work.
His time in the military gives the story more shape. Krizan served in the U. S. Army in the Vietnam era, and he was stationed in Germany. Long after those years, he worked as a patient and later volunteered at the Iowa City VA Medical Center.
There is a strong sense of return here. Service, openness, and community each show up in their own part of one life.
Why Memory Becomes a Form of Legacy
In the Moment rests on a plain idea that hits hard: keep the memory.
If no one speaks it out loud, it slips away.
A story about the family might hold for a while, then stop being told. A person who shaped someone’s life can later feel like a mere line in a record. Even the person you were years ago can start to feel far off after enough time passes.
Writing helps resist that fade.
Krizan’s collection gathers moments from roughly fifty years and gives them a place to stay. With that, a private recollection can reach beyond the one person who first lived it. That is why the book reads like a family record.
His children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren can meet more than dates and basic facts. They can sense the inner side of how he moved through the world: what caught his attention, what weighed on him, what he kept wondering about. They can see who he cared for and what he came to understand in the end.
Legacy is more than what remains after someone is gone.
At times, legacy is just a way of seeing.
Review: Finding the Extraordinary Inside the Ordinary
The strength of In the Moment lies in its willingness to take ordinary experience seriously. Many memoirs are organized around an extraordinary event. Krizan’s approach is different. His larger subject is the accumulation of experience itself.
Family, military service, work, depression, curiosity, relationships, hardship, nature and mortality coexist because that is how they coexist in an actual life. There is no clean separation between the intellectual and emotional worlds. A person can spend decades working professionally while simultaneously raising a family, remembering childhood, experiencing loss and privately wondering what any of it means.
Krizan allows those worlds to meet.
The book’s emphasis on memory preservation, heritage, truthfulness and gratitude ultimately asks readers to examine their own meaningful moments. That invitation may be where the collection becomes larger than Krizan’s biography. Readers inevitably bring their own memories to a book about remembering.
His family stories may call another family to mind. His reflections on hardship may awaken memories of someone else’s difficult period. His thoughts about aging may remind readers how differently they understood life twenty or thirty years earlier.
The particulars belong to Krizan.
The act of looking backward belongs to everyone.
Beyond In the Moment
Krizan’s writing journey does not end with this anthology. His body of work extends to Over The Waterfalls, while Search for Meaning represents another step in his continuing literary exploration. Even the titles appear to speak to one another.
In the Moment begins with presence: recognizing experience while living within it.
Over The Waterfalls suggests movement and the experience of being carried into what comes next.
Then there is Search for Meaning, perhaps the most direct expression of the question underlying Krizan’s writing all along.
What does a life mean when viewed as a whole? It would be convenient if fifty years of writing produced one final answer.
Krizan’s work suggests something more interesting: perhaps meaning is something people continually discover rather than something they solve once.
The Search for Meaning Continues
At some point in life, you stop treating “looking back” like a way to stay stuck. Often, it is really a way to notice things you could not spot while they were happening.
A work path that felt like it would never end turns into a single chapter. The kids who needed eyes on them all the time grow into adults. Hard stretches that once felt limitless end up having edges. Some people walk into your life and then they move on. Streets and rooms change, and the mind that remembers changes as well.
That space can bring regret. It can also bring thanks.
Krizan pushes for the thanks, but he does not act like pain can be wiped out. Bad moments sit in a life alongside good one. The key is to see what those moments taught or showed you. In his work, he asks readers to face what really happened. He also asks them to count the moments worth honoring.
Not because everything was lovely.
Because every moment, in the end, helps shape the person who looks back.
A Life Remembered, a Legacy Preserved
Maybe the clearest sign of Ken Krizan’s path is how long it took him to reach this point. In the Moment would not look the same on the page if it came from a younger writer. The book depends on a larger view, and that view comes with time.
Years passed, and the writing changed.
Krizan grew up in Cedar Rapids. He served in the Army. He finished school at the University of Iowa. He spent more than thirty years in health science work. He raised a family. He also faced rough stretches. Later, he chose to volunteer with people in the veteran’s community.
What he built was not only recollection.
He built ways of seeing what others carry.
That is the quiet force behind In the Moment.
Krizan does not have to turn his life into a parade to make it matter. His book offers a different idea. Maybe any life holds strong material. It just needs steady looking, close attention.
We do not live our days as if they are already finished.
We move through parts of a life.
A morning, for instance.
A real conversation.
A letdown.
A birth.
A final goodbye.
A coming back together.
A flash of fear.
A small act of help that surprises you.
Then, after that, another plain day. Only later do we look back and see the pattern. Those small scenes were the story all along.
Krizan worked for about half a century, writing some of what he kept inside.
Now, with In the Moment, Over The Waterfalls, and the ongoing Search for Meaning, he holds onto that record. At the same time, he invites readers to look at their own lives. Because what feels ordinary today will turn into yesterday.
And some moments we almost missed while we were in them end up being the ones we wish we could reach again.
Get More Connected
Ken Krizan – In the Moment
Amazon
World of Books
Bookshop.org UK
Readings
Also by Ken Krizan: Over The Waterfalls
Forthcoming: Search for Meaning
