Lie down on the couch or the chair and pull up a blanket over yourself. It is December. There is dew on the grass and frost on the windows. Sit down and take a deep breath. It has been a year, once again. A little heat would do you well. We must all rest and rejoice when things end. It is not an easy task to spend a year and come out unscathed. People rarely achieve it, and if you did not come out without scratches, then you must, by all means, sit and rest. After all, in a few days, it will all begin again. Life has a tendency to keep going. No one prepares us for the effort it takes to learn to live—not doing things, but simply living. But it does take effort; it takes a lot of it.
We must rest when we get the chance. It makes me laugh how to live is to breathe, and yet, pausing to take a breath is something we are the slowest to learn. No one teaches us this, so we take the most time to learn this, and yet, it is the single-most requirement to lead a life worth living. So, you must begin today. There is still a week left. Sit in the sun tomorrow, and watch the world glow with yellow respite. There will be time to do what is left. It is never too late, but you must learn to sit in the sun. The year is not yet over. There is still one more thing to learn. And if you take my word for it, a week is more than enough to learn to breathe. We must look around more often.
Perhaps, that is what I ought to do next year—look around more often. You can never get enough of the world; there is always more. There is always more than what meets the eye. But we must learn to stop and catch our breath and look around the world. It is something most people do not learn at all. And then, when the time comes, they do what they ought to have done much earlier. They lie under a blanket, struggling to breathe, looking around frantically. They do not know how to do it correctly.
That is when they realise that all life is practice for the moment we die, and we must keep at it if we want to do it gracefully.