01/01/10

I like typing the date of a new year for the first time, especially this year, as above, with all those wonderful binary ones and zeros when you annotate it. It feels so new and immediate, like you’ve turned over the annual odometer. A fresh, exhilarating start.

I’m glad I live in this hemisphere. It just feels right that a new year should start off with a dose of crisp cold air. I stayed out a little longer this morning on my walk with Millie because the chill was good. It woke me up.  

Last year I said that my New Year's resolution was to not make any resolutions and I’ve pretty much stuck to it, thank you. The temptation to project ourselves into the future is never stronger than at the beginning of a year…all the things we are going to do differently or better or more of; all the things we’re going to do less of, or not at all. And that’s fine.

Human beings are planners even if we are in far less control of our plans than we like to think. There’s that old Jewish saying, right? “Man plans, God laughs.” 

So I am going to try to honor one resolution in 2010. That is, to live in the moment as much as humanly possible, to experience the wonders and mysteries, the joy and even the pain of life as it happens.  

No dwelling on the past or fretting about the future. Life is in the Moment; it does not really exist outside the present. And when you think about it, the Moment is huge. Billions of people are experiencing it. Time is complicated yet the Moment spans the universe, a throbbing cosmic heartbeat. So it is no small thing to live in it. 

Moments are a series of virtually eternal occurrences, and it is in that eternalness that God lives. So if I am to truly experience living, and to connect with the divine in my life, I must try to do it more in the Moment.

It’s a resolution that I will probably break repeatedly. Yet for the Moment, I’m keeping it. Happy New Moment.  

Edward Grinnan is Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of GUIDEPOSTS Publications.