Living 2016 Fully

We have moved into a New Year,  and according to the wisdom from ancient Korea each person becomes one year older but with a twist, young people add a year but the old, subtract: one year from life.  As a society, we are getting older writes a history professor in the Peace Weekly, and many meet the new year with sadness.

Life begins slowly, with age it gets faster: true, also of countries, beginning with development, but followed  by infirmity and collapse. Speed in our lives doesn't allow us to reflect, and  we became careless. We look forward to a new year and hope for change.With the start of the new millennium, we experienced great euphoria, and we had a baby boom but shortly after a financial  slump,  and  unemployment caused suffering. This was true of other countries where we had Lone Wolf millennium terrorism.

The lunar calendar tells us many things and in 2006, we had the year of the two springs, a very rare occurrence. In that year, we had a leap month in July,  which made for a long year. The number of marriages increased over the previous year by 16,630,  and the year of the pig 2007, a favorable year for births; we had 45,000 more births than the previous year. This year is the election year, and we will have many messiahs appearing.

Steve Jobs in his  commencement talk to the   students of Stanford University in 2005 quoted from something he had read:  "If you live each day as if it was your last you'll be right. I have looked in  the mirror every morning and asked myself: If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what  I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been 'No'  for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something." The professor recommends to his readers this as a healthy approach to a way of living each day fully.

Yi Sun-sin  the Korean Admiral is the professor's example of a person who overcomes his own desire to do what was necessary in his situation. It was at the battle of Myeongnyang Strait where he called all his staff officers and ship captains: " He who seeks his death will live and he who seeks his life shall die." Under impossible odds, he was victorious.

He concludes his column with a desire for himself and readers to begin the  new year in the way Steve Jobs and Admiral Yi looked upon the work they were to face. We should see this year as the last one and  make sure that we live to do all the things that we want and need to do before the New Year of 2017, and not lose time with trivialities.