22,534

New Year's Eve and New Year's Day always get me to thinking about time. Isn't it curious how we rather arbitrarily have two days on which to commemorate the last and the first of a cosmic cycle that actually has no apparent beginning or end?  Why not June 30th and July 1st?  The weather would certainly be more pleasant for outdoor celebrations.

Calendars and clocks are human constructs devised and needed to order and standardize the natural cycles of Earth's movement in space by way of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years.  And we in turn order, standardize, and measure our lives accordingly with schedules, seasons, holidays, birthdays, and death-days.

Thinking along these lines as one example of shifting perspective, I recently wondered how old I would be if my life were measured in sunrises instead of years and birthdays.  There is a place online to do this.  Today, January 1, 2014 is my 22,534th sunrise - some of which I actually witnessed.   What have I done with all of those days? 

Time constructed in calendars and clocks is necessary.  I get it.  But, why not regularly and intentionally shift our minds out of these constructs of time in order to view and live our lives from different perspectives?  Many people have done and continue to do this. We call it mindfulness, meditation, prayer, reflection, contemplation, day-dreaming.  We might even begin to understand our need for sleep as nature's way of taking us out of our own constructs and therefore pay more attention to our dreams.

So, my New Year hope for you and me is, regardless how we do it, that we regularly and intentionally release our minds from artificial constraints of time and see where we are led.  My guess is we will all be surprised and enriched. 

Happy New Year!