Every Minute Is A Passage

But what minutes!  Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.  ~Benjamin Disraeli

New Year’s Eve is something that I’ve never quite understood. In all honesty, the celebration of time passing carries sadness for me. Because the movement of the clock is so pensive, counting down the seconds to the next year is not an activity I relish.

My past has brought me to above realization. In 2008, I witnessed  New Year’s Eve in the confines of a hospital room. The smell of burnt coffee littered the hallways, the flower pot  painting on the waiting room felt out of place, and the beep-beep of the monitor made me feel like the pit in my stomach was growing outside of me. My father suffered a seizure and my family took turns keeping vigil by his bedside. I still remember the texture of the  thin grey-blue patterned carpet and how I laid a blanket from home on the ground. As the clock hit 11:00 p.m., I told my Dad that 2009 approached. He didn’t hear me. My only conversation that night was with Dick Clark’s New Years Eve special. As I write this, the fragility of those minutes still stirs anxiety in me.

What that experience has taught me is this: All 525,600 minutes of a year are important. You don’t need a calendar or a New Year’s Eve celebration to tell you that. Every minute is a passage. Through open roads. Or confined tunnels. To happiness. Or sadness. To silence. To noise. To death. To life. But all of it, every single minute, is essential.

This year take a vow to honor your minutes. They define your passage.