Transitions

Sunset

It’s been a year of transitions, large and small.  The first one was my transition from full-time worker to unemployed and then to budding consultant.  Things in that third realm are moving slowly-but-surely in the direction I want them to go, so perhaps that role is not only one of the transitions, but a continuation of my hopefully ongoing evolution.

The most dramatic example of life transitions was the near juxtaposition of the passing of my oldest relative, Uncle Paul who died at the age of 99 and the advent of the newest relative, my great niece Amelia June, born just a few weeks later. 

When I think of what transitions and transformations my Uncle Paul saw in his 99 years, and project what possible changes little Mia will see in her lifetime I am both awed and excited and maybe just a little frightened.

He lived through two world wars and countless armed conflicts, some named wars others less honest in their descriptions.  He saw diseases that uniformly killed conquered.  He saw polio, diphtheria even some cancers go from fatal to curable, to preventable.

Mia will grow up learning to read on a computer.  She may never hear the word polio.  She’ll take her first plane ride before she’s a year old, and get to know her grandparents as much through Facetime as she will through face-to-face time.   I won’t even try to project the changes she will see.  The only certainty is that changes there will be and someday she will see look back in wonder at those changes.

What’s Zen got to do with this?  A key tenant of Zen is that everything changes.  It’s easy to see that concept as helpful when times are bad, but good times change as well, don’t they?  It’s not so great, in the middle of something really good, to think that someday that will pass and there will be bad times.  For me the key lesson in this is to focus on the present moment.  Ultimately, that's all there is anyway.  

If I could wish anything for my newest little niece, her brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and of course parents, it would be that she will be present in each moment of her life, celebrating to good times and learning from the bad. 

One of my favorite quotes, it’s been around so I’m not sure where it came from originally, but I heard it from Carolyn Myss is:

“Yesterday is History, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift, that’s why we call it the ‘Present.’”    I wish you all the joy of this precious present.    J

Sunrise