2016. Worst year ever!?
Lots of things are being said about '2016'! In my echo chamber there seems to be a focus on how terrible it's been and all the people we've lost; which of course given a choice, we wouldn't have wanted to loose...but I feel something more significant is being missed!
Sure things have gone wrong and I am by no means dismissing or belittling what anyone has lost or suffered this year! I have had some real low points; some properly stomach-turning, want-to-just-run-away-and-hide and even a few fuck-everything-just-let-it-all-burn, shitty points too...and if I stop to think about them, they're all somehow far too easy to recall! I can take myself there almost instantaneously and start feeling them all over again...it's scary how simple it is!
Has it all really been that bad though!?
Here in lies the kicker : 2016 will always be remembered as a terrible year if we focus on those sorts of things...the ones we associate with pain; those that when felt, give way to other memories of discomfort and hurt, quickly building into a monsoon of darkness and discomfort!
This ability to transport ourselves through time to different places is pretty remarkable when you think about it...the reality is something quite different though!
To quote Alan Watts:
“You can’t get out of the present moment, you can think about the past and you can think about the future, but since you do that thinking now, the present is inescapable.....Time is going along, life is going along. Time actually, the ‘clock time’, is simply a measure of flow, a way of going tick-tick-tick-tick and counting the ticks (and you say well, we’ve lived through so many ticks), but never the less, the real time, as distinct from this ticking thing, is a flowing, and yet it’s still.....It moves, but you’re always there. It’s always now, you never get out of now. You can’t get out of now and you never will!”
It often seems like so-so much more, but that's all we really have...now! We can control and influence so little of it, but this present moment definitely has a flow...I can feel it! Just as feel 2016 had one...and despite all the noise and rhetoric about how doomed we might be, I believe there is more than just hope!
Whether you make resolutions, are considering what to change, have already set yourself goals or just think of this 'day' as another tick of the imagined and insignificant 365th partitions we split our orbit into...bidding fair well to 2016 is not about forgetting or 'good riddance', it's about changing our perspectives!
Remember all your fuck-ups and what you can learn from them....make your apologies and then let go...know that we cannot feel joy without the hurt, that if there were no struggles there would be no reward, that every ending is always followed by a new beginning.
Lets remember all those we've lost for why we miss them. Focus on all the incredible things they did and the gifts they gave us (which is why we miss them). Celebrate their lives and work and all the wonderful things they made us feel. Talk about the good times we had with them, tell stories of how brightly their lights shone and turn their music up loud!
2017 is going to be great, just like this tick was, because the good we do in the small, seemingly insignificant ways to influence the little we can, affects the next moment and the one after, and that sets us on a course and keeps the flow moving forward in the right direction...changing things for the better.
One Love,
JDx