New Day
“Waking up this morning, I smile.
Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 102, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Broadway Books:1998.
Caterpillar becoming pupa, chrysalis Sally Klein
Richard Rohr in his daily email compares Christians and Buddhists. “Christians are usually talking about metaphysics (“what is”) and Buddhists are usually talking about epistemology (“how do we know what is”). In that sense, they offer great gifts to one another.” 1
All I know is that the writings of the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, so often speak to me. What a marvel idea to wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “we have 24 brand new more hours before us. I don’t want to waste a second, minute, an hour. It is a new day.”
Yesterday is past. We went over what we had done and left undone the night before and prayed that God would forgive us of wrongdoing, also called sins. We remembered where we found joy, often where we least expected it. We remembered where we found love. We remembered the experiences of that day where we saw God working in our life.
This is a new day, a new beginning. We can no longer regret the past. We will make living amends where we need to where we harmed others, but we have a new start. We hope we have learned from the past. We will not keep doing the same thing every day and expect different results. We will look for synchronicity or moments or serendipity where we meet connections, related events. I write about the Eucharist one morning and someone not aware of that confides later that same morning about how important the Eucharist is in his life. We receive a message from someone we have been thinking about that day. We think about someone we have not seen for some time and call. They tell us it was exactly what they needed at the time.
That is synchronicity. These are God connections, and they are all around us in each new day.
1 Center for Action and Contemplation, Richard Rohr Meditation: Mindfulness, cac.org, August 24, 2018