I Can't Wait for the End of 2020

This week I have heard the following:

"Get through your day with x product."

"I wish it was Friday already."

"Thank God it's the weekend."

"I can't wait for this year to be over."

And I wonder, at what point are we going to sit back and reflect about how we are wasting our precious lives with wishing our time to pass. Wishing for the work day to end, the children to get out of their "tantrum phase", for the end of whatever it is that we can't cope with. But what we lose is the gratitude of life that we all know which can bring us happier, healthier lives.

There are two things which we can never get back: time and our health. The latter, we can take preventative action to help, but time, once it's gone, it's gone. And I'm not talking about artificial time made by watches and clocks, calendars and governments, but natural time created by the Earth's natural cycles of day and night, the seasons and the Earth's rotation around the sun.

The older I get, the more I realise how much more I want to achieve and do and see and enjoy but this language of "getting through a day or week or month or year" is just a reminder of how we are losing the opportunity to live in the present moment. Now, I don't deny that 2020 has been a shocker of a year for many of us, myself included, however, the faster it ends, the faster that hill into ageing looms into view.

Have you ever noticed that time flies when you are doing something you love, but it drags when you are doing something you don't like (often your job)? The time never changes, but our perception of it does, because when we are doing what we love we are fully present in the moment. In yoga the breath is the focus, that is, we still the mind and witness the present moment without judgement or opinion, it just is. So it is with life.

And yet here we are, a whole society, wishing a WHOLE YEAR of our lives away as if some magic date on the calendar will make Covid-19 disappear. It happened. It is happening. And it's awful. But wishing our lives away in the language we use is not helpful.

We get about 80 healthy years on this planet and by the time we realise the brevity of life, we are already half-way through it, and so time becomes our most important asset. We let go of jobs, relationships, unhealthy habits and childhood woundings and we grab hold of our health, the people we love and our true passions in an effort to make the most of what is a finite time we have here, on Earth, at this time.

You are amazing, Earth is amazing, we are all amazing. We have ONE opportunity to live as this person we are right now, so why are we wishing our lives away with the words that we use? So next time you hear yourself "getting through hump day" or wishing for the end of the year, reflect on what you are actually wanting - you are wishing for life to hurry up and move on, when what you ACTUALLY want is for life to be slower and to be fully present in every moment so that you can savour in the bliss and wonder that is life.

Gratitude is the key. Gratitude in the small things - watching the lizards dart and play on the window ledge, the scent of jasmine from the garden, the feeling of the seed heads tickling your fingertips. We are drowning ourselves in the woes of the world, and wishing it all away, but if we stop and look, the world we live in is wonderously extraordinary.

Life is short.

Life is precious.

May we all embrace the magic that it is right now.

© Alyssa Curtayne 2020