We stand at the end of one year and on the brink of another. The space between years is like the dawn or dusk, like the space between breaths, between past and future, and the gap between birth and death. The end, we know, is really not an end at all but more like a beginning. “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” In the year ahead, can we live by that which is beyond the measure of hour, day and year? In the words of T.S. Eliot, can we have faith to be in each day as if for the first time.
In the gap between years, we ready ourselves to go beyond fixed definition of what has been. Last year’s words belong to last year’s language and last year’s fears belong to last year’s woes. What was done is done and now is the time to be with the one thing that is happening every moment. Time to give up the finite version of yourself and be one with the infinite. In truth, this New Year is not new at all but part of the awesome flow of perpetual time. Yogis know that time has no beginning and no end and so never feel “pressed for time.” As is said in Zen “make this very moment 10,000 years.” Time is of the essence to be smack dab in the moment and to be simultaneously in transcendent time.
Know that in the year ahead there will be more suffering, there will be more joy, more insight, more loss. Many things will happen to you and around you. Swing your front door open and welcome them all. Like so many before you on the spiritual path, your pilgrimage is one of ongoing discovery. Give up your expectations that you need be a certain way. Give up the delusion that you will ever “have time” or that anything belongs to you or that you belong to anything. Learn to trust in a thing far wider and greater than yourself. Wake then this New Year, stretch your mind and heart out to the horizon, and humbly take your place in the awesome presence of time.
