The first of January

Happy New Year! And welcome to my new blog. The title of this blog refers to a gift a friend gave me recently. I thought the gift was so wonderful that I just had to write about it all year long. It's called "Wisdom for the Day: Timeless Calendar", and it's published by Brahma Kumaris.

The word "timeless" in the title refers to at least two things: first, the calendar has a page for each day, with a short proverb on it ("timeless wisdom"); second, the days of the week aren't listed, and the 29th of February is in there, so the calendar should remain useful until the next calendar reform.

I intend to comment briefly on each day's proverb. Since I'm a Christian, you might find me coming from a Christian point of view, and perhaps even quoting the Bible every now and then.

"But", I hear you ask, "how will we know what saying you're commenting on?". Well, I suppose I can quote it for you each day. "Surely that will breach copyright!" Interestingly, I can't find any assertion of copyright anywhere on the calendar. Perhaps the sayings (or at least some of them) are already in the public domain. I've written an email to them to ask their permission anyway, because I don't think you need to assert copyright to retain those rights; I'm not sure. Unfortunately, I haven't heard back from them yet, but I intend to post my comments for at least January, regardless, and assert that this constitutes fair dealing in Commonwealth jurisdictions, and fair use in the US.

So, let's get going:

Enjoy the present moment because it is the future in the making

At first, I had trouble figuring out what this meant; in my experience the present moment all too soon becomes the past, not the future. In the end, I decided that it was trying to suggest that our actions and attitude in the present affect our enjoyment of the future. I can agree with this.

However, I don't think that the enjoyable thing right now always leads to the most enjoyment in the future. If you never try anything difficult, or always give up trying something when it becomes difficult, then you'll never have the satisfaction of finishing a difficult task. If you never bother to do hard work, you might find yourself in quite a sticky situation in the future. Of course, difficult tasks and hard work can be enjoyable in themselves, and we can partly affect this just by our attitude to the task, but you can't rely on always enjoying everything you have to do.

I do agree with the sentiment that it's usually good to enjoy whatever you're doing, and (when appropriate) to actually put aside time to enjoy the present moment. If you never enjoy the present moment, then you'll never enjoy yourself at all; you'll never benefit from all that hard work you've done for the sake of the future.

Don't worry; I've peeked ahead a little, and I won't be this critical every day.

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