A full week into the new year and the hot and sweaty resolutions of the past few days tend to simmer when faced with one unavoidable fact of life: it’s back to the grind for most of us.
The twinkling lights and cozy festivities of the past few weeks, for many, may have numbed inner turmoil and general discontent and inspired bright new aspirations for the year yet to unfold.
But, rather suddenly, these high hopes and dreams give way to a blatant reality: New Year. Same Old, Same Old.
Same old job. Same old schedule. Same old routine.
It’s easy to get swept up in the everyday humdrum. It’s easy to lose ourselves in daily demands. It’s easy to allow discontent to creep in and take up residence in our minds.
How can we live our best lives when we have so many demands on our time?
In the islands, we use the word ‘tabanca’. It means a deep longing or love-sickness for something. For me, ‘vacation tabanca’ was a very real concept. Returning to my daily activities after a break, no matter how brief, always took major adjustment.
I’m happy to have now learned what I had failed to see then:
There are blessings in the mundane. Life in all its glory is happening all around us if we would slow our pace just enough to see. If we would empty our hands just enough to feel. If we would stop doing just enough to be.
Creating a different life or a different me through fancy resolutions wasn’t the answer. Creating margin and space to allow myself to ‘be’ made all the difference. I didn’t need to escape from life. I needed to create a life I didn’t feel the need to escape from. I didn’t need drastic changes. I needed little adjustments that dominoed into big effects.
We keep hearing that we must seize the day and we therefore assume that we must look for big things, or that we have somehow failed this mandate by living within the parameters of our daily lives. But it’s not so. To seize the day doesn’t mean that you must burn hours you don’t have in order to accomplish things you don’t want in order to acquire things you don’t need. I propose that, instead, to seize the day means to take control of your time, in order to accommodate the things that make you come alive, in order to attain the contentment that you crave.
Take hold of the simple changes that can add meaning to the seemingly mundane. Grasp the little moments that allow for connection. Reach for pockets of silence and stillness and harness peace amidst the race taking place all around you.
Seize this beautiful, unremarkable, ordinary day. And make it worth remembering. Make it yours. And, in so doing, make it something new.
New year. New day. New perspectives. New life.