Happy Next Moment to You! Celebrating Endless Renewal (BTW013)
⁘ Created: 2025-01-01 ⁘ Updated: 2026-01-01
Why the Solar and not the Lunar New Year? Whoever decided the first Monday? We celebrate these cyclic transits — the turning of seasons, the resets and renewals of life. But does anyone celebrate the passage of time itself?
Yet our brain doesn't experience the immediate present. It lives in a construct tethered to the past. When you are aware of how the past imprints your experience of life, you come nearer to the actuality of an ever-fresh present.
#ByTheWay #AllThingsChange #PresentExperience #YearTransitions #PassageOfTime #SeasonsOfChange #Renewal #Impermanence
So, Happy New Year! By the way. Whatever does that mean — is there a point to it? Happy New Year, happy winter solstice or Christmas? Happy birthday, happy today or tomorrow? What are we on about?
Some of these cycles integrate with nature's course. Moon and sun, lunar solar calendar, have their reset points. Then we have the seasons of nature, transitions of the year, significant in the old world. On the other hand, we have less connected cycles, like the week. I mean, whoever decided that this shall be the first Monday? Happy Monday to you.
Then, whatever significance each one of us attributes to each of these. Mid-winter, midsummer, those are significant. Days are getting longer, shorter. Full moon, some go cray cray. Dark moon, time for the occult contemplations, right?
We can commemorate the highlights in that transition, or we can just commemorate the passage of time itself. Christmas came and went, Santa came and went, midsummer came and went. Then, happy new day to you, happy new hour to you, happy new every minute and second to you. Happy new moment as the ongoing greeting for you.
The point here is that existence is ever renewing. Change is perpetual. You cannot lock life into Christmas or to your birthday. You cannot lock life into Sundays or your happy moments. The more we commemorate change in itself, we remember the ever changing nature of our existence, the more we liberate ourselves from the suffering born of our attachment to particular moments and states of being.
Now, the human brain actually does not live and experience the absolute present. We live in reconstructions, accounting for at least the immediate past for our frame of reference. Now, that's something to be very conscious of, a matter of metacognition. Being aware of how your past experience influences your interpretation of the present.
The more unaware you are of the past influence on your present experience, blind to all those diluted memories and distorted interpretations, the more locked in you are to a convoluted, corrupted perception of what actually is — as in right now in front of you. The more aware you are of these dubious constructs in the mists of your mind, ever questioning, ever re-evaluating, the more you enter into the present actuality.
Ever exposed to fresh data as it is, ever willing and ready to re-evaluate the framings of your reality. Breaking free from the distortion field of past impressions. Not attaching to permanence in constructs that are in perpetual change. We may yet get in touch with a more immediate and intimate sense of what is — living in perpetual freshness.
Then, merry cyclic renewal and happy each new moment to you, my friend. All things are forever reborn. Ever in transit, at each plane of our being, merrily we serve the waves of transformation in the ephemeral stream of time.