“This coming year, I want to live”

What do New Year resolutions mean? Nothing, I have discovered, unless you resolve your old year’s first. In September I was diagnosed with colon cancer and since then, I’ve had time to think about time. It seems as though my past years have collapsed, one after another, one into the other, until I can see my experiences both all at once and as a long train of hours. Everything I’ve been has brought me to where I am now. I must look backwards to move forwards.

I am not dying, yet I think much more about mortality. According to certain Eastern traditions, at the moment of death there occurs an unravelling — one revisits one’s life in reverse, unspooling from the Now into the Before, like a movie with the production credits rolling first. It is said that certain Tibetan masters even un-whirl as a ‘rainbow body’ — their decaying physical form spiralling off in a spectrum of colours, a kind of transcendental disco ball.