Hi, friend!
How is the month going for you so far? If you celebrate any holidays around this time of year, how has that been sitting with you this time around?
I love this time of year. The month of December fills me with all the joy and wonder I had the privilege of feeling all those Christmases of childhood.
And during the tougher years, December is usually a welcome reprieve from the hardness—the lights, the smells, the sounds, they always provide my spirit a welcome change of pace, even if just for a moment.
But because this month of merriment is such a balm for my heart, I can often struggle with the anticipatory panic of it ending.
Can you relate?
It can often be challenging to truly enjoy our present moments, especially when they are so delightful and also so temporary...getting lost in the sadness of the impermanence of it all is common.
And every December, without fail, this happens to me. I have to remind myself every day to choose to enjoy the now. Future me will figure out what's next come January...for now, I can just embrace the moment as best I can.
And here's the thing: the temporary nature of life is exactly what makes these moments so special.
If my Decembers, in all their bright lights and holiday music and joyous smells, simply mirrored the other 11 months of the year, they would start to lose their luster.
This time of year would no longer give my soul the same lift if it looked the same all year round. The very impermanence of it that causes my childlike heart to panic around mid-December is actually necessary for the survival of all of its beauty and joy and life.
And this is the same principle that makes the act of living in these bodies so truly magical. These lives as we know them are temporary—and that is actually crucial for us to be able to truly embrace the gift of living.
Without the temporary, there would be no growth. No learning. No expansion or nuance or beauty.
It is, I have found, one of the very hardest lessons of this lifetime—as much as I know all of this to be true, pieces of me still desperately cling to the dream that I will never experience loss and that everything good will stay (in the same form) forever.
And this is not to say that heartache is something to be enjoyed...never will I be the "everything happens for a reason," sunshine-and-rainbows-all-over-your-sadness type of person.
What I do know is that the very magic of this life we're living is made by the knowledge that it is temporary. And instead of fearing it, perhaps if we choose to embrace that a little more—to dance with unabashed joy within the nature of our impermanence—we might be more and more able to truly bask in all our present moments as we receive them.
The gift of this life is on borrowed time...and that's the real beauty of it.
The gift of the temporary