On July 11, 1994, my mom read to me from the Valley News: “Today is 2,000 days until the year 2000.” Today, in this new year and in this new decade, we are more than 7,000 days past the year 2000 and more than 9,000 days have gone by since my mom read that to me. That’s more than half of my lifetime, and yet I feel like I was just there.
How is it that 9,000 days have passed by and I don’t feel it? This is the true barometer of getting older: Time warps and shifts and runs away too fast and we don’t feel like it has.
We don’t understand how we look old in the mirror but still think we’re somewhere around 17.
But I also wonder if time has gone by so fast, or without me truly understanding the passing of it, because I wasn’t paying attention.
This year will be the year in which I actively choose to pay attention. It seems like a moment in time when my consciousness is ready to be just that, conscious. It is too easy to let time just pass by unnoticed, to not be grateful, to just exist without being present.
If you feel the same way, make this the year you really pay attention — to the news, to your friends, to your children and, maybe most obviously, to yourself. What are your needs and wants this year? Not your resolutions, but what do you need this year?
I need Clarity. It’s the word I have chosen for this year, to help me sift through what is really important, to see where my energy and time and love are best put to use. I want to be clear on what I choose to pay attention to.
It is not nearly as easy as it sounds. It feels like everyone and everything is yelling for my attention — my son, my phone, my desires to this year do all the things I haven’t gotten done yet. I have to be very aware of where I am putting my focus, because it is not boundless. I can love my child and husband and friends all with a similar devotion simultaneously, but I cannot pay good quality attention to all of them simultaneously. So realizing that our attention is precious is important. If you choose to put your attention into social media, it cannot then be spent on something or someone else. Attention is a finite, limited resource and needs to be treated as such.
Paying attention is not easy. It may lead to anger, to frustration, to feeling like you want to act, don’t know how, and therefore wonder why you even bothered. And somehow, in this bright and beautiful new year, in this crisp winter of pure seasonal perfection, we find ourselves in a scary time. Things are changing quickly with the only continuity seeming to be uncertainty.
In times of great pain, stress and loss in my life, I have tuned out. I had to cope and survive and one way I did that was by not being present. And it would be so easy to do that now — to not read the news, to just get through the grind of having a small child — but then where and what and who would I be once I finally opened my eyes again? Would my child be a man and the bulk of my life over?
Paying attention, the ability to focus on what matters, to give everything to the life you want and the ones you love, yourself included, is a gift of human nature and leads to a life lived well, fully, deeply.
My mom always said to me, remember the value of the small increment. Maybe you start by realizing how you feel right in this moment, which might lead you do something about the pain in your body you try to ignore.
Maybe you read the rest of this paper. Maybe you just sit and give yourself the permission to pay attention.
None of us knows exactly how many days we have left. And living each one like it’s the last is totally unrealistic, especially when you have people depending on you. But no matter how many days I have — 9,000 or more, 9,000 or less — I would like to spend them awake and aware, paying attention to as much as I can, to as many as I can so that I know I was fully alive.
C.S. Hammond lives in Hartland. Email her at cshammond36@gmail.com.