Exigency: “Live everyday as if it were your last.”
My friend left a comment on my last post about my 2011 in review, to which I replied, “It has been an amazing year, one in which I decided to try to live everyday as if it were my last day on earth (and the fact that I really don’t know when my days in NYC will end helped lend to that scenario).”
I was given the gift of limited time last year–not limited days of my life, but limited days in my setting of NYC–a microcosm of urgent ground, in which I woke up every morning wondering what I could squeeze out of that day. That energy came with me even as I spent half the year in California outside of NYC.
And it has made all the difference.
I wonder what would happen if I gave myself the impression of limited days in which I could write? Something more than a deadline–? And in what way could I create that exigency?
Also–I am more than aware that 2011 was an agonizing and horrifying and awful year for many of you. For me, the “worst year of my life by a mile” was 2007. It ousted any of the years previous I’d spent depressed or dismayed or discouraged or broke.
But every year since then, I/we know that statistically speaking, nothing can be as bad as 2007. And that too, has made all the difference–to know where your bottom is, and to know you’ve survived that bottom (whether graciously or not, because in the end all that matter is that you survived), to have been broken and healed, and to know you’ve learned lessons, and to know you can make it through anything, go forward.
So for those of you who have had an awful 2011, I give you that hope. And now it’s 2012–and I hope 2011, now in the past, leaves you in the present with valuable lessons and knowledge and resilience.
And come to think of it, my awful year gave me urgency, too. There’s nothing like a bad year to tell you what it is you really really want out of life. And you’ll spend subsequent years reaching for it.
I hope in 2012 you reach for it–and get it.
