Marathoner resolves to celebrate each moment

Mark Lombard
Commentary, Clarion Herald

At the beginning of each year, our relationship with time seems to take a dramatic turn. With Thanksgiving travel and celebration soon morphing into Advent, the hectic holiday season and then the festivities associated with Christmas, many look at the New Year as time to catch our breath, to reflect on the past and look forward to the future.

The traditions of New Year’s resolutions and celebrations have been documented as far back as four millennia to ancient Babylonia. And, just a few decades before the birth of Christ, ancient Romans established a new calendar, with January as the first month, in honor of Janus, a two-faced god who looked back to the past and forward to the future.

According to Forbes magazine, studies indicate more than 40% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, while many fewer succeed in realizing their goal.

A most challenging 2023

In my case, time – having enough or too little of it – was something I was wrestling with over the final months of 2023 and not something just connected to the changing of calendars and following a cultural tradition.

In many ways, it had been a difficult year, beyond that of living in a society in which celebrating what unifies us, what makes us community, seems to be tragically of less concern than what divides.

In 2023, I experienced losses – more than ever before – of friends and family members.

In November, I lost an apparently healthy cousin with whom I had just made plans to get together just before Christmas to have dinner and reconnect after several years. Here one week and gone the next.

Late last spring, just after our whole family converged on the French Quarter to celebrate our connection to one another and commenting to one another that life couldn’t get any better, we discovered, without any warning, that our son has brain cancer.

Since then, his health and treatments and the welfare of his family have become what we wake up and go to bed thinking about.

I feel like I have been riding a roller coaster of emotions and am seeing the world, if not in a new way, certainly with much greater intensity.

Use of time reconsidered

I’ve always clung to the belief that the secret of life is found in living in each God-given moment, of being spontaneous, of searching out and digging for the silver lining in every life situation.

That world has been rocked.

Maybe that is only natural, faced with the likelihood, if the prognosis is true, of outliving one’s child.

Coming from a family of long livers, with parents and aunts and uncles all living almost without exception into their 80s and 90s, and my mother going strong, living in her own house, at 98, I might have been guilty of taking longevity for granted. In my 70th year, my health appears to be quite good.

But entering 2024, I am much more aware of mortality – mine and those I love – and the preciousness of time.

We all have grown up being told and internalizing that “there is not enough time in the day” to finish everything (we think) we need to do, that “time flies,” and, biblically, that “you know neither the day nor the hour” when our time runs out (Mt 25:13).

As a marathon runner, I’ve always had a sense of time as the enemy, running against it, training to shave off seconds where I could and valuing myself in the race based on how little of it I’ve used. And even in my decades-long career, I’ve judged myself on how much I could accomplish in how little time. In some ways, that has served me well.

But now, with new vision, I’m able to see time, not as a commodity to maximize in a utilitarian way – as in jealously squeezing the marrow out of every moment – but as this overwhelming gift to share the valuing of each other, our family, our community, our own creativity.

Be more ‘present’

My son, Matthew, and I have discussed, as he has experienced radiation treatment and has begun his chemotherapy, how his cancer diagnosis has sharpened our desire: to be much more present to each other and others; to celebrate those moments we have together; to actively plan special times, rather than kick ideas about connecting down the road into a distant future that never seems to come; to broaden the community of those to whom we show active love.

My New Year’s resolution, and one I have committed to try to observe each day, is to find and be truly present for the joy in each moment and celebrate the divine spark found in each person who we’ve been given time to share this God-gifted life.

Mark Lombard is the business manager of the Clarion Herald. He can be reached at [email protected].