Beginning the New Year

Each year bring its own memories, some good, some bad. Whatever the year was it is forever part of who you were perhaps who you are. We are unrelentingly propelled through the present, often so obsessed with looking over our shoulders or peering blindly into the future that we miss the only time we actually have, the present.

I long ago gave up making resolutions at the beginning of the year - such an arbitrary and unsatisfying way of being present in one's life. Instead I renew a long held resolve to live more fully in the present and to savour whatever each day brings. Some are momentous and tear past us in fleeting glimpses. Others seem uneventful. Each is precious and at any point in life finite.

I have come to a place where I begin to grasp that in a profound way deep within my being and as I sit in my daily meditation I try to open myself up to an even greater awareness of being present in an amazing world. It is a troubled place and despair is oh so easy to embrace as we are so often drawn to witness the terrible injustices and inequities. People starve to death every day where food sits stored in abundance. It has always been this way. We are simply more aware of it in the digital world driven by the 24 hour news cycle. This makes it no less cruel or unfair yet to somehow imagine the world has not ever been so is naive and pointless.

It simply means we must each do something. The idea that one person cannot make much difference is the biggest impediment to affecting change in the world. We can each transform the world in small ways that may have an enormous impact on others. If nothing else, as a Vietnamese Buddhist nun once said, "If we change ourselves we have changed the world."