Today it is dark and cold here in North Carolina, and I don’t feel like going out for my walk. The messages from the earth seem loud and clear – hunker down indoors, hibernate, or at least send your most tender parts deeper into the earth for protection. Stay quiet, undetected. Rest. Protect and rebuild your potency. 

As I settle back in here after four months in India, I am feeling the now-familiar pause and recalibration as I move out of one stream and seek the current of another, like being caught in a little eddy where two rivers come together. For a moment it’s unclear which way is downstream, but I know nature’s force will gather me up in a new current soon enough. 

This time of year can be a little disorienting for many of us, with the influx of holiday activities and family energy or house guests swirling around. Add in the societal pressure (misplaced, many earth-based cultures would say) to create a new vision or goals or resolutions, when perhaps all you want to do is catch up on lost sleep, drive your roots in deeper, and remember who you are outside of the holidays.

Let’s be honest – at this moment in our collective communal life, “transition” is nearly constant. Every day it seems some new threshold is crossed. Your middle-schooler enters high school, your boss retires so you’re moved up, your body has a new pain for no reason, your parents enter assisted living…. 

Of course, in many ways this has always been true, as nature shifts in a constant cycle. The air gets colder, so the geese fly south. Then the spring buds emerge, and they fly back. The same is true for us, as we are simply another expression of nature. 

The Vedic texts describe a 6-stage lifecycle that everything moves through – a human body, an idea, a political movement. It begins with unmanifest potential and progresses through birth, growth, maintenance, deterioration, death, and a return to the unmanifest, ready to cycle again. 

Presence in any one of these stages implies the inevitable movement to the next – yet it can be easy somehow to forget this most basic fact. Growth and maintenance is always followed by decline. While we may know this intellectually, it seems to be human nature to FEEL like certain people, or ideas, or aspects of our existence will stay the same for the foreseeable future. We may wish it so.

Yet getting comfortable with the inevitability of transformation is necessary if we will ever find peace in this reality. 

It can help to consider this 6-stage lifecycle as a prompt into a genuine, refreshed feeling of gratefulness. For example, during a moment of happiness, we can ask ourselves, “What is contributing to my happiness right now? And is that aspect growing, maintaining, or degenerating right now?” It’s a simple reality check to help us appreciate the present, and to prepare us for the inevitable shift around the spiral.

The opposite is also true – when we’re feeling blue or angry or anxious, we can ask, “What is contributing to this mood?” and look forward to its eventual decline and demise. It absolutely will change – of this we can be certain, even when it feels intractable. 

Today, as you turn towards the brand new year ahead, notice if you are moving downstream in a steady current, or if you are caught up, resting in an eddy for a moment. Let this be a permission slip, if you need one, not to forge ahead yet with the next grand scheme. Let the next “new and improved” project wait. Just hold tight for a minute. 

Change will come – it always does. But it doesn’t have to start today.