The solstice has arced through and left its promises of light and longer days. Christmas, Boxing Day and Hanukkah are in the past tense, and once again we inch our way toward the trailhead of another year.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with the resolution business. All those lists taped to the fridge, the scoldy shoulds hidden beneath the frothy encouragements. Resolutions: the word is too muscular for the delicacy of something begun anew. Newness has its fragilities and needs its attentive watering to encourage the passage from what isn’t to what could be. I’m keen to sprinkle my spiritual fertilizer on this list below to coax its intentions into something strong enough to stand on their own, form their own patterns and weather systems and rain their luscious juju into my life.
Rather than resolving, I’m navigating. I’ve plotted points on the horizon and will move toward them as best I can. I’ll probably stop for a beer every now and then, sit on the overlook and regroup, but I will keep moving toward these ideas in the distance. I’ll use the list below as beacons but will also leave room for the unforeseen and the unexpected, two forces with wicked senses of humor and uncanny senses of timing. I’ll head into 2014 believing it is the movement itself toward something that encourages the sort of joy that glows in the dark.
- Laugh at myself. I usually roll my eyes at the breathy self-help exhortations that want me to the best me I can be: Try something new! Stretch yourself! Grow! Yeah, that all sounds swell as I imagine shiny, new and improved versions of myself. The hitch? The swampy part of watching myself struggle, counteracting the urge to bolt from the difficulty, and desperately seeking grace while I pedal like a caffeinated rodent on the hamster wheel of frustration. This year I’ll look for more comedy in watching my own life. I will aim to bulk up my underdeveloped humility muscles, and I will attempt to chink away at my need to be the smartest pants in the room.
- Submit to wonder. Kids help with this as they find bugs, lightning and weird body tricks endlessly captivating. I’m looking for flashes of that kind of excitement about the juicy, ordinary wonders of the world. And I’m hoping that flashes become moments, moments become spells, spells become days.
- Leave the house. Quick inventory: Think of a handful of meaning, radiant moments. Did they happen inside the house or outside the house? Hmmm.
- Stop talking. Less chatter, more matter. I’m handing this one off to the unknown, wise, dead person who said: “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.” This turns, certainly enough, on my ability to recognize the healing, rich depths of silence, to see and know silence as its own thing with colors and time zones and calories.
- Make art. This year I will make more art. Not always the capital A art, but anything that expresses the spirit or the gloriously messy human condition or the world outside my head or inside my soul. Why? Art and the making of art and the being in the midst of art is an essential vitamin and without it, I suffer from spiritual scurvy (which, as we all know, has ferociously unpleasant side effects).
- Lose the car keys. “Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities,” writes Rebecca Solnit. I kneel at her feet. And then I walk on.
- Fail. See #1.
- Turn my transmitter to receive. This one is a modified version of: If you build it, they will come. I’ve found that when I am still and open myself wide, little gifts like little birds make their way onto my path, call out for me to notice them. If I’m smart I hold them in my hand, listen to their messages and then release them back into the world. I want more of that.
Wishing all a year rife with discovery, surprise and joy.
