This is the moment of embarking. All auspicious signs are in place. – Deng Ming Dao, 365 Tao
Deng Ming Dao is an American artist and writer and 365 Tao is a book of daily Tao meditations that contributes to The Thought for the Day from time to time. Its influence on our lives has been profound.
Today is New Year’s Day and for us humans it is a time we regularly use to determine what we want to accomplish over the next twelve months. It can either be something new or the continuation of a long-held goal.
That we tend to it today is interesting because New Year’s Day is nothing more than a man-made line of demarcation separating one calendar year from another. True, the Earth does revolve around the Sun every 365 days, but the day we choose to celebrate the new year is arbitrary and us humans have celebrated it on various days over the centuries. We can, and should, use every day to determine what we are going to make of our lives. We don’t always do that and doing so for the New Year has probably been part of our human experience since we started keeping calendars about 3,300 years before Christ.
So let’s do it today. What are we going to do this year? Regular readers of this feature know that what we do isn’t particularly important. All of us were issued various and different talents at birth and what interest you might bore me to tears. What’s important is that it is something we are compelled to do from deep inside us, something that utilizes the skills and ambitions we were born with.
We can only answer that question for ourselves. I can’t answer it for you and you can’t answer it for me. But each of us has an obligation – to ourselves and our fellow humans – to do just that, to determine what we were meant to do with our lives and then to go out and do it.
A year from now there will be another January 1st. It can be a day where the same person will look back on time squandered in 2018 and look forward to 365 more days of the same. Or 2019 can herald a different person looking back on – and forward to – twelve months of living the life they were meant to live. The choice is ours.
The Thought for the Day runs regularly. Quotes are from Gaylon’s private stock.
