As we approach the feast of Christmas, very often another temporal milestone gets missed and that’s the Winter Solstice. Both dates have their significance and their differences.
The 25th December is a man-made date that some people use to either celebrate the birth of Christ and/or catch up with relatives. The Winter Solstice represents an alignment of the Earth relative to the Sun where some have their shortest day and others have their longest.
In our modern world, with central heating and electric light, we have somewhat distanced ourselves from Natural Time, yet it still has its usefulness.
I began to use Natural Time for project management about seven years ago and have discovered my life runs much more smoothly as a result.
At the same time though, without wearing a watch, I always know what time it is and am rarely late for meetings. Our modern calendar has its place, so long as we are mindful not to become enslaved by it.
Accordingly, exactly on the last New Moon (the 11th of December), the next book in my series on practical applications of mindfulness was published. It’s called Managing Time Mindfully and the synthesis of two calendar systems is just one of the temporal delights it explores.
It’s available worldwide for Amazon Kindle and Kindle Readers and I bent some time so readers in the UK can get the print version (and via Amazon early in 2016).
Big thanks to all those who placed a pre-order, you helped me get it into the Top #100 books on time management. I’d love to get it into the Top #10 so, by way of thanks for all those who get a copy, there’s a free pack of meditations available for all who place an order before the end of the year (which incidentally is another man-made date).
From where I am sitting and where you are reading this blog, we are completely unaware of this twice yearly event – and why should we be? In our modern day world where we are totally in control, nothing as trivial as the orientation of the Earth could possibly have any effect on us … surely?
When viewed from space however, a different perspective emerges. We can see clearly that half the world is in darkness and half in light. Well there is nothing new there as it is like that every day of the year. The difference is that the cusp between light and dark is lined up with the rotational axis of the planet.
This means that every person on the planet experiences approximately the same amount of daylight and darkness, apart from those standing right on the Poles … and of course miners and submariners.
The exact time and day of the equinox, however, is not strictly that important. What is significant is that we should use it as a time for reflection. Too often our years just bleed into each other with each one following the pattern of the last. The fact that the Earth goes around in circles doesn’t mean we have to.
It doesn’t matter so much if there is any astrological or cosmological significance to the Equinox, just that every so often we should take stock and do some forward planning and, once we’ve done that, we should take action.
Spring is a great time to start a new project – for example, I’ve written all my books in Spring – something I only realised after I’d published the fourth book !
So for the last two months I have been planning and Mind Mapping my next book – today I start to write it in earnest !!
So, whether you are planning to write a book, or not, take some time out today to Spring Forward and so the seeds of what you are going to grow over the next 12 months.
Note, although the word equinox is often understood to mean “equal [day and] night”, this is not strictly true. For most locations on Earth, there are two distinct identifiable days per year when the length of day and night are closest to being equal; those days are referred to as the “equiluxes” to distinguish them from the equinoxes. Equinoxes are points in time when the Sun is right over the equator. Equiluxes are days which can be a couple of weeks either side and can vary depending where we are on the planet.
As we approach the feast of Christmas, very often another temporal milestone gets missed and that’s the Winter Solstice. Both dates have their significance and their differences.
