Happy New Year Every Day!

Carla woke up on New Years day not feeling like she was going to have a good day. She didn't want to start the new year feeling badly because it might be an omen of things to come. What if we treated every day as a new year? Today is just another day on the calendar. In fact, for much of the world, today is just an ordinary day. The Chinese celebrate New Year in February. My Persian friends celebrate it in the spring. For me, New Year starts in September because I spent so many years in school and that's when school always started.

Of course we want to look into the future with optimism and the desire for improvement in our lives. Jack Nicholson may have said it best in his movie “As Good As It Gets.” What if this is as good as it gets? Can we imagine this life and ourselves as perfect or okay? Can we be happy with what we have? If we aren't, what are we willing to do to change it so that we have a better life?

"The Matrix" is my favorite movie. It illustrates the spiritual path beautifully. Neo, the main character, is told that he is "The One" early on. That concept filled him with expectation of what it meant to him to be "The One". He had to go through utter devastation and all his expectations had to be broken before he was able to see what being "The One" really meant. That's true for all of us. When we begin our spiritual path, or any other path we choose, we often have a period of darkness where it doesn't look like we will get what we want. We have to go through that period so that we can become clearer about what we are really asking for.

I was five when I knew that I wanted to become a doctor. I had limited knowledge and experience of doctors at that time. My experience of the medical field continued to develop as I grew, but I really had no concept of what it meant to be a doctor until I experienced it firsthand. We think about how things are in our minds, but until we have the full experience, we don't really know what that is. I wanted to be a doctor so badly that I was willing to have whatever experience it took for me to get there.

Our understanding of love is also limited by our experience. Our parents love is confined by their pain and perceptions of what love is, and that might lead us to develop a distorted idea of what it is. Who has the ability to teach about love? We move through our life experiences, and learn as we grow. Each time we have an opportunity to love, or give to someone else, we grow. We learn the most from our ability to love in the face of adversity and from forgiving what has hurt us in the past.

All the spiritual teachings speak of living in the now. In order to let yourself be in the now, you have to stop hanging on to the past. And....you have to be willing to live your fullest life right here and right now. On a certain level we are all "The One" in that we each have special gifts and opportunities to offer. We each have to find our way through the maze of our existence to see who we are.

Happy New Year today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that. May each day of your life be an entire new year of healing and growth.