Countdown

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five four, three, two, one, Happy 2011!!!!

The countdown we do every New Year’s Eve is not so different from the countdowns we do whenever we are waiting for something to happen. We count the days, hours, minutes and seconds, looking forward to happenings we believe are important in our lives.

The point is, we are always waiting for something to happen, doing these little "countdowns": a promotion at work, a boyfriend who is going to appear in our lives, a trip with friends, our wedding day, a baby who is going to be born. We focus all our energies into all these expectations and then we forget to live the present.

A pregnant woman who spends all the time counting the days till her baby is born and forgets to enjoy the unique feeling of having someone growing inside her. A bride-to-be who, instead of enjoying the pleasure of preparing her wedding, starts yelling at everybody: the wedding planner, her family and the groom.  She wants all the details of the wedding day to be "perfect", forgetting that life is more than  just one day, one night or an event, that the best part of a wedding is to prepare it: choose the flowers and decoration, try on the wedding dress, define the food to be served at the reception, the song for their first waltz, the cake, all these nice and small details.

John Lennon says in one of his songs that “life is what happens to us while we are busy making plans.” We have the tendency to always put our happiness far from us, imagining perfect situations that end up not happening the way we had planned. The boy friend you had expected for so long is not that perfect after all, your dream job may not be as wonderful as you had pictured it.

In this year that is just staring now, it would be good to think of what happened to us during the ending year; everything we had planned what we gained and what we lost. It would also be nice to think that we could change the way we face the events in our life.

I hope that in 2011 we can do many “countdowns”, especially because this means we have not stopped dreaming. But, at the same time, we should learn to enjoy the ten the nine, the eight, the seven, the five, the four, the three, the two and the one as well.  We must reach the “Happy New Year” being certain that we have lived intensely, enjoying each moment in a unique and special way.