Each Moment Is A New Year!

Embodying "Now" Is the Only Possibility

In 2009, I snapped this photo while meandering through the woods at Gampo Abbey where I did a retreat with the Venerable Pema Chödrön.

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You are here. Reading this. There’s no other place you can be in this moment but right where you are. Although the small mind loves to time travel, the body waits patiently like a forgiving parent for it to return to what’s happening in the moment. Meanwhile, life unfolds whether we’re paying attention or not.

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life”— is what my history teacher wrote in my yearbook when I graduated from high school in 1985. I am pretty sure she wrote this in everyone’s yearbook, every year. Now I am 55 and lifetimes away (or am I?) from who I was as a graduating senior. Although my yearbook has long disappeared after many years of moving house and purging my belongings, for whatever reason this simple platitude popped into my mind as I began writing this post.

Maybe my teacher’s sentiment sprung to mind because today is the start of the New Year—the first day of the rest of 2023. None of us knows what will unfold for us each moment of each day—never mind getting lost in fantasies about an entire year! We can only embody now. And now. Each moment is eternal when thoughts of past and future drop away.

Of course, the earth is unconcerned by our humanly concerns. It spins on its axis as it steadfastly orbits the sun. I don’t know about you, but I almost never remember that what we humans call the start of the New Year is actually the completion of the earth’s orbit around the sun; or, depending on our perspective, we could view it as the start of the earth’s orbit.

However, it is only us humans who make these hard-and-fast distinctions between beginning and ending. As Eihei Dogen reminds us in “The Time-Being”:

“Do not think flowing is like wind and rain moving from east to west. The entire world is not unchangeable, is not immovable. It flows.

Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside of spring. Study this in detail.

Spring invariably flows through spring. Although flowing itself is not spring, flowing occurs throughout spring. Thus, flowing is completed at just this moment of spring. Examine this thoroughly, coming and going.

In your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow and move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds, thousands, and myriads of eons, you have not devotedly studied the buddha way.”¹

Fortunately for us, the earth does not pause at the “end” of its 365-day orbit to demarcate the “beginning” of a new orbit. Orbiting flows through orbiting. Rotating flows through rotating. Earth flows through the universe. No beginnings. No endings.

Speaking of flowing, I also do not usually recollect that as I walk on solid and stable ground, the earth is spinning at about 1,000 miles per hour or 1,525 feet per second at the equator. Even if I did remember this miraculous feat, my mind can’t even imagine the organic object I have the good fortune to inhabit spinning at such velocity.

As human animals, we have the gift of being able to shift our perspectives so that we can see ourselves, others, the New Year, a blade of grass, a glass of water as “containing multitudes” like Walt Whitman so poetically states it. But when we trap ourselves in our personal universe of projections—be they glorious fantasies of future accomplishments or miserable memories of past failures—we lose sight of the vast mystery that flows through us each second.

If I ever have the opportunity to write in someone’s high school yearbook, I’d inscribe this quote from Suzuki Roshi:

“Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.”—Suzuki Roshi

Happy New Moment!

1. Tanahashi, Kazuaki. Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen. North Point Press, NY, 1985.