5 minute read
Chaplaincy
The blessing of the PRESENT MOMENT
Charles Dickens began his epic novel A Tale of Two Cities, written in 1859, with these words: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
One could be forgiven if reading this for the first time, one thought it was written about the year 2020! It has been a year of paradox and uncertainty, with some very important learnings for all of us, but also a lot of anxiety, dissatisfaction and disappointment. Who could have foretold that this year would turn out as it has? It has been a difficult year in New Zealand but even more so in many other countries that have been much harder hit by COVID-19. As I am writing this, we are sitting at the precipice of one million deaths from this virus across the globe. In the USA alone, the number of people dead equates to the population of Hamilton. We have been very lucky to have been led by a government that has been decisive in its decision making and has prevented a large-scale loss of life here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
It has been a very strange year at Dio, and in some ways it feels as though we have spent a lot of energy and a large part of the year planning events that we later had to cancel. It makes sense that there is some sense of disappointment around what has had to be done differently, postponed or cancelled.
Our Year 13s have certainly not had the year they were anticipating and excited about. However, I think we need to be proud that, as a community, we have faced the challenges with courage and hope and have had the best year that we possibly could have, given the circumstances. One of the things that has become painfully obvious for all of us this year is that we have little control over many things in our lives. As human beings we like to be in control of our so-called destinies and we don’t like it when things don’t go according to our plans. Feeling like we have no control is scary and it causes us a high degree of anxiety. Events like this pandemic show us that no matter how hard we work, whether we have goals or not, whether we are successful or not, a major event can completely derail our lives. Many people have faced redundancies and have had to change the direction of their careers. The tourism and hospitality industries in this country face massive challenges in this time when international travel for leisure is halted and there have been restrictions on going out and gathering together.
Along with the challenges we have faced, we have also had the opportunity to remember some things that perhaps we had all but forgotten. For example, we live in a community and have a responsibility to our neighbours to ensure that we are all safe; our families are extremely important and we need to ensure we have quality time with them; the world is a better place when we are kind to one another; we need time to breathe and to rest. We have grown in appreciation for the people who work in essential services – health care workers at all levels, supermarket workers, cleaners, care workers, some of whom are at the bottom of the pay scale in our society. There are many more things that could be added to this list.
The whole experience this year has brought home to me once again the importance of focusing on the present moment. It has been a year of planning events and then cancelling them, of missing out on things that we had looked forward to. If I were to dwell on what has not been able to happen, then I might fall into the trap of regret and wishing things had been different. But, that kind of negative thinking about what is past is helpful to no one. There is no way to change what has already happened and feeling regret about it achieves nothing. At some point each of us has to give up wishing things had been different and accept that this is the way things are right now. We could also fall into the trap of thinking only of the future – of wishing this year to be over and focusing only on either what we plan to do when all this is over, or worrying about what the future holds. As we have learned this year, we have less control over how things are going to turn out than we thought we did, and worrying about something we can’t control is simply futile.
Alan Watts, who was a writer and thinker from the middle of the 20th century wrote this: “We are living in a culture entirely hypnotised by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between a causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realise that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore totally out of touch with reality.”
Considering he wrote this over 60 years ago, it is still pretty accurate of our lives now.
There is nothing we can have an effect on at any time in history aside from right now. Whatever we regret or grieve has passed and we can’t do anything to change it. We can certainly plan for the future but there is no guarantee that whatever we plan for, yearn for or long for is necessarily going to eventuate, as so much is out of our control.
