A Note from Neale...

My Dear Friends...

And so, we have moved into yet another year. Another cycle in the Grand Cycle that is Life Itself. 

They go so fast, these cycles. They go so fast. Have you noticed? Barely has one begun than it seems over. What happened to that year? 

At the end of our lives, we will ask the same question about the whole of our existence. Actor Dennis Weaver, in his book All the World's a Stage, talks about the death of his father, when he was at bedside, and one of the last things his dad ever said to him. Frail and dying, the older man whispered to his son... 

"...it all goes so fast..." 

Dennis said those words have never left him. His father's last lesson had an enormous impact on his life. He chose from that point on to live it to the fullest, to never step back from risk, to take the chances it was necessary to take to create a rich and full experience. 

(2006 Update Note: My wonderful brother and friend, Dennis, left his own body this past year. I miss him terribly. I wonder if, when he shared this with me, he could possibly have known that he, himself, had only five years left…) 

(2010 Update Note: I am writing this now on the first days of the second month of 2010 and I am now more aware than ever of the rapidity of the Passage of Time. I am now 66, heading towards 70. What am I going to do with these next years? How many do I have left? Five? Ten? Maybe, if I'm lucky, 20? I can begin counting the years now...maybe even counting the months...and it's not that I'm afraid or sad about going Home...but what am I going to do here in these last moments that are given to me—?) 

(2018 Update Note: Here we are, 2018… who would have thought that all the changes we have seen since this original article written in 2001 would still apply now. I have had open heart surgery, over a year ago….. and life goes on… How much time do we have? Do I now have more ahead of me than when I first wrote this? How much time... "it all goes so fast..."?) 

Perhaps the greatest risk, the biggest chance, any of us will ever take is the risk of recreating ourselves anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever we held about Who We Are. This, of course, is the purpose of all of life, if Conversations with God is to be believed. And yet, this is the very thing that most people never do. 

For years — for decades — I was stuck in my Old Self, and I had no thought about moving to a new place or creating a New Me. I may not have liked everything there was to experience about the Old Me, but I knew who that was, I'd become comfortable with it, and I was not going to change. 

Yet we are not our yesterdays, we are not our mistakes of the past, we are not our so-called failures and limitations. We are not even our "successes." We are born again in every moment, and it is at times like the present moment — when we begin yet another year, another life cycle — that we can be especially empowered to step away from our old ideas, our old concepts, and our own experience of ourselves, and produce new ones. This is achieved simply though a decision to do so. 

Yet that decision takes courage. It takes an enormous willingness to shed our Old Selves and to reveal the New. 

Every time I think, yes, well, I'll get to that tomorrow, I'm reminded of the words of Dennis' father. 

"...it all goes so fast..." 

(And hasn't this first month of 2018 gone fast? My gosh, it was Thanksgiving and Christmas just a whisper ago! And wasn't I just watching the Rose Bowl the other day? Well, uh, the other day was a month ago, and one-twelfth of the New Year has just vanished. So, you think I'd better get on with it? 

Whatever the "it" is that you have determined to accomplish in 2018, do you think you'd better get on with it, too? Just wondering here. Just wondering...)

Love and Hugs,