A couple of weeks ago when it turned to December, I felt a tinge of sadness.

The New Year always makes me feel a little sad—a reminder of endings, death, mortality, the passing of time.

I am reminded that time is fleeting, and that one day I will die. There will be a time when I’m no longer here, with this consciousness, when I won’t be able to feel the wind on my face or breathe in fresh air, when I will no longer see the trees or the earth around me, when I’m no longer with the people I love, when I can no longer see or feel or experience this world around me.

This time of the year reminds me of life and death and aging and the ways life will change, how life is fleeting.

Most of us live our lives as if we’ll live forever—blindly going through the motions of each day, always thinking or feeling like there is some point in the future when we can do the things we want to do, always thinking we’ll have time.

Our minds will do just about anything to keep us from remembering that we’ll die.

But one day, we will die.

And if we always wait until the future to do what we want to do, we’ll miss out on the moments we have now.

We’ll miss out on truly living right now.

We’ll miss out on living life while we’re actually living it, right now.

I want to spend my life presently, in this moment. I want to feel connected, alert, aware—present. I want to be fully engaged and alive in my life while I’m living it.

I want to be as aligned as I can be, as connected as I can be—to my heart, to myself, to this moment.

I want to be present.

When it turned to December, I asked myself, “How do I want to spend this last month? What do I want to do? How do I want to feel?”

I sat quietly and felt into it.

We could spend the last weeks of December being truly, deeply connected to ourselves and what we want, allowing time to expand, our experience to deepen, our presence to fill us—or we can allow it to slip through our fingers quickly, mindlessly, as we await some distant point in the future.

We don’t have to wait until a date in the future.

While I understand why people make New Year’s resolutions, we don’t have to wait until the New Year to do the things we want to do. We don’t have to wait to make changes or begin something or start living in a way that calls to the deepest parts of us.

What do we want? How do we want to feel? What do we want to do?

These are questions we can ask ourselves every single day, all year long.

Why not do what we want to do now? Why not cultivate the feelings and experiences we long for, now?

Why not live our lives in the moments we’re actually living them—right now?

Why do we put off the moments we’re living now, the time that we have now?

What if we tuned in with ourselves all year long, each and every day, and asked ourselves what we want, what we want to do, and how we want to feel? What if we connected to our hearts and moved in the ways that feel right to us, flowed with the current of life that is moving through us?

What if we didn’t always think about waiting until the future and allowed ourselves to settle into the present—living these moments fully, sinking into them, breathing them in? What if we could be fully engaged and connected now?

What if we could hold the parts that will come in the future, the things that we want, while we live as intentionally, as fully, as presently, as we can now?

Instead of waiting for the New Year, instead of thinking about how we’ll do all of these different things in the future, start or stop doing things in the future, what if we started right here, right now, today?

What do we want? What do we want to do? How do we want to feel?

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