Many years ago I heard someone say that as we age the percentage of our life represented by a year decreases. At ten years old a year is 10% of your life, but at fifty one year is just 2%. Ten percent feels a lot bigger, and a lot longer than two percent. It’s the same twenty-four hours in each day, the same three hundred, sixty-five days every year, but how we experience that time changes.

As a child I always felt like it took forever to get around to my birthday each year, and at the New Year it would always feel like an enormity of possibility. I could do, change, become anything because there was so much time, so much space. Today there are still days and seasons that feel endless, but I notice more how quickly they do pass and I have a greater awareness that even when I am in that hard, uncomfortable moment it won’t last “forever,” it probably won’t even feel so difficult once I am through it. I am more aware of each moment even as those moments pass more quickly; I suspect that the one is what leads us to notice the other.

As we close 2025, on the one hand I look back and think of all that happened, that was accomplished and missed, that seemed so possible in January and now sits still waiting, that which did not even seem because it was out of my imagining and yet was done. There is the very natural desire to look back and look forward but as I reflect on the speed with which these days come and in which the moments pass I am wondering more about where it is that I find myself right now. Right now, right here is the only place I actually can be, it is the only place I am. And so I wonder, where is it that I am? What direction am I pointing in? What step do I intend to take from where I find myself now?

I have nothing against reflection, it is an important act in learning and growing; likewise I have nothing against resolving, planning, setting goals, however you might like to think of that forward looking act, we need to do this so we move with intentionality. But life is lived neither where we were or where we intend to go; we live where our feet are in each and every moment, and allowing ourselves the awareness of that presence allows us to fully live each of those moments without regret of losing them.

We may not always like where we find ourselves, we may not be in safe or sustainable places, we may like where we are so much we cling to a memory even after the reality of what we loved has passed. There are times when we need to get out of the circumstances of a moment, there are times when we need to let a moment go. But even in that, we need to be presently aware of where we are so that as we engage with that moment we do it in truth, we do it with the acceptance of reality, we allow ourselves to receive everything we need from it, and release what needs to go so we can move on. If we don’t know where we are, if we are not aware of the present being, we lose the experience, we lose the day, we lose a little piece of our life.

I have had many years where I have looked back and thought, ‘where did that time go?’ ‘I don’t even remember that day/week/month,’ ‘the year just flew by.’ And that is time I lost as I regretted, remembered, sought, longed, or where I just failed to be where it was that I was. We live more fully when we allow ourselves to live where we are, when we acknowledge the reality of where we are, and when we choose with awareness how we will move next.

I pray that 2025 was a year where you had moments to learn and moments that you are okay letting go of, that you knew it when you smiled, and you meant it when you laughed, and you understood what it meant to cry. I pray that 2026 will be a year where each day you notice where your feet are, that you can choose where you want them to point, and that you are surrounded arms to catch you when you stumble.

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