Today is Oestra/Ostara/(and some other names, too), also known as the Spring Equinox. Religioustolerance.org has a good article about how the pagan spring festivals influenced modern Easter. That'll irk the Lambuel crowd.
Today is a day for renewals and new beginnings. Today should be the day we make new years resolutions. My own plans for the day are a bit subdued today. We have company, so driving off to a forest preserve isn't part of the plan.
Tonight is also the new moon, also generally a potent time for new beginnings. That makes today doubly potent, no?
But that leads me to what I think I wanted to remind people of. Every day is a new day, every day is a day of change. Every day we wake up a slightly different person than we were the day before. It's part of our nature—part of our experience—to label things, and to schedule things. We celebrate the anniversaries of things, and that lets us feel better about mostly forgetting those things throughout the year. We have a day to be thankful about things, and 364 days to take them for granted.
Look at the sheer number of resolutions that don't last through January. We don't commit to things on a daily basis. I'm just as guilty, and I can admit it. Commitment is hard for me, I've never been good at it. Almost seven years into a marriage and I can say I don't always fail, but Jareth is helping me on a daily basis. Commitment, and every day he reminds me. And at least once a day I think to myself, I'm a daddy! and make a silent promise to him.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that people make decisions all the time, I'll do this, I'll stop doing that. But simply making a declaration doesn't change anything. You have to be the thing you want to become. You have to own it.
"There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."
That's my challenge for this year. Today I choose to begin committing myself to it on a daily basis.
Posted by fictionman at March 20, 2004 08:54 AM