I was reading last year’s Jan 1 post – it left me wondering how much did I accomplish over the year, what has changed, and what I would write about at the start of this new one.
Well, I had written about living intentionally, and I managed to do that more or less over the year. More more than less, I like to think. Here is that list again:
For 2025 and beyond:
Strengthen my body
Sharpen my mind
Broaden my horizons
Deepen my understanding
Challenge my limitations
Consolidate my finances
Express my creativity
Shift my energyLive intentionally!
I could change the year from 2025 to 2026 and the list would hold true – that is good to know because this list was meant for not just a specific year, but beyond.
Looking at the list again, it is interesting that Strengthening my body featured at the top. Makes sense. Our ‘lives’ after all are seemingly lived through our bodies. What we experience as life is essentially the experiences of the body to which we give a name.
Strangely, when we fall asleep, our sense of the body disappears – all its pains, fears, and desires become non-existent – they don’t just change, they simply don’t exist anymore in our awareness. It is as if they appear when one is awake and disappear when one is asleep. Where does the stomach pain or the runny nose go while we are sleeping?
Our waking state of life, which we mistakenly often take to be ALL of our life, is essentially the experience of the travails of this body, for better or for worse; however, we become acutely aware of it not when the body is healthy but when it’s not. No wonder we say, “health is wealth.”
It is also interesting when we fall asleep every night we take for granted that we would wake up the next morning. What if we didn’t? With what confidence do we fall asleep each night?
What if our conception of life were inverted – that it is when we sleep that we return to our true essence of who we are? How then would we come to understand what we experience in our waking state?
The task is not to see what has never been seen before, but to think what has never been thought before about what you see everyday.
– Erwin Schrödinger
I was reading about the tragic passing of Tatiana Schlossberg – may she RIP and may her family have the strength to continue in her absence – and it made me think again how tenuous our connection to life is through our bodies, and how the healthiest of us may have no inkling of what might be brewing within, and when IT comes, there is little one can do. I have casually thought for some years that all of us are likely to be struck by the Big C sooner or later. It’s just in the air, water and our food – hard to escape it really. Matter of when, rather than if.
All of this may sound morbid, especially at the turn of the new year, when everyone is in a merry mood and wishing the year to come will be some variation of ‘happy’. But I think it is quite alright to use this time to also reflect on our mortality, because it is one of the two certainties of life. Sometimes people have a year to do just that.
If there is one change I would make to the list this year, I would change the first word ‘Strengthen’ to ‘Care for’. That would mean the usual stuff – daily exercise, meditation, sleep and nutrition – but it would demand more intention. It’s the last one that I tend to lapse on most, and looks like I really just have to start cooking properly, not just make do.
Two years ago I was struggling with a serious case of hives and an injured shoulder that took more than eight months to heal. That meant several sleepless nights. Then things got better – the hives disappeared and the shoulder healed – and I became careless again – taking the body for granted (a little bit), forgetting (not entirely though) that health is indeed the most precious of our possessions.
What if like Tatiana, despite all our best efforts to be fit and healthy, the Big C comes along and knocks on our doors? Well, that’s that then, right?
Last week I got a reminder of how fragile all of it really is – our tenuous hold on our bodies and hence our lived experiences. I am not yet sure which way this particular curve ball is swerving and I am wondering if I should wait to know more before I write this, but I figured this is perhaps best written in the space of uncertainty, regardless of outcome.
When I wrote about being ‘unbreakable’ in my last piece, I meant it because there is a connection to reality that is not mediated through the body. However, even as I wrote it then, I knew there were two potential events that could really test me – one of them feels like it might be at my doorstep – if not now, then some time in the future.
As long as one is tethered to life through the body, one is susceptible to the vagaries of time. There isn’t a real fear of death – not just because there isn’t yet news of its impending arrival in the near future – or a grasping desire to accomplish something or the other in the meantime, but it would be a royal pain to fall terminally ill – just the inconvenience of it and having that become the focus of one’s attention and energy.
The other possible event – I don’t even want to think about it, let alone write – we will let that one be.
At the start of this new year, I have had to ponder a little more about the health of the body, how to take care of it going forward, and what opportunity is being presented here – perhaps to live out the illusion of this existence to the best of one’s ability, with some humour, as if it weren’t.
It reminded me that the book by Victor Frankl is not about saying yes to life when all is well but in spite of everything, and that’s where the beauty of it lies.
Featured Image: Photo by Wietse Jongsma on Unsplash