Another Year is Coming.

You ready?

Here we go again. Another year is wrapping up in less than two months. How did that happen? So many questions pop up during this time as one year slides into the next. What did I do with 2023? What will I do in ‘24? Where is my life going in all this free time, post working? I haven’t figured it all out. There are ways in which I feel like I’m spinning my wheels. But this road I’m on isn’t a bad one. I just want to navigate it with more honesty, avoid the trickery of denial that keeps setting up roadblocks, alert myself to the ways in which I am atrophying.

Someone once said we can either get busy living or get busy dying. That person was quite right. We can flatline long before our actual demise if we’re not careful. I struggle with the idea of busyness though. I understand how productivity brings a positive feeling with it. I have done something. Here’s the work of my hands to prove it. I guess it depends on what your busyness consists of. A lot of what I do is internal. Taking things in, weaving things together, blending, processing.

I believe I am here to be creative. I do believe it’s my purpose. To marry what I have read, heard, thought, mulled over, synthesizing all these things into a writing, a song, a piece of visual art. The urge to create also comes, at least for me, with an equal measure of resistance. However, in my ever expanding repertoire of tools to fight against my own inanity in life I am in the trenches plotting against myself to overcome it.

This battle against my own resistance is apparently a brain battle. We are wired for survival and the avoidance of pain. It is deep within our DNA. We often avoid challenges because we don’t like the feelings attached to facing them down. These structures that served to keep us safe don’t recognize when a danger is not life threatening. We can be thrown into fight or flight or seizures of fear, by anything: spiders, windshield wipers, a blank canvas. What was designed to save us can often imprison us.

If this protocol isn’t serving us properly or in a way we deem as helpful or positive, comes the opportunity to rewire, reprogram, doing the good work of altering our automatic, habitual, unconscious choices and ways of being. Striving toward improvement, climbing to higher ground, seeking better light. Our emotions and feelings are big clues to where the work needs doing.

In the attempt to not settle in my ways, here’s what I am in the process of learning, have mulled over during the year, am determined to take with me into 2024. Please indulge me as I riff a little bit here:

Learning how to live means I am in process till my last breath. It means I am always a work in progress. (So it’s okay to be imperfect)

It means don’t be afraid to question everything; never stop questioning.

It means experimenting on myself, still creating habits but also re-evaluating those habits from time to time.

It means being more honest with myself.

It means serving myself as I would others.

It means transitioning from being someone who seeks approval toward greater authenticity.

If I am truly in the process of becoming what I’m supposed to be in life, that process is my life’s work and should be my singular path. Ignore the critics.

It means never hardening into wood — making certain that the growing tip of myself remains pliant and flexible.

For some, it means taking large steps that put them on the front line: not wearing a hijab, seeking an abortion (these days), experimenting with gender, loving someone outside of your ethnic, racial, gender norm, believing that love is not only what ultimately conquers, it also persuades.

Does it make sense that despite our outward differences we are all striving for the same thing? The variety of us as nation states, ethnicities, cultures, histories, norms can make it appear we are siloed off from one another by our differing ideas, goals, motivations, methods, hearts and minds. We find so many ways to divide ourselves, misuse each other and hatefully insist on tribal loyalties.

Despite all these differences we have one thing in common. We are mortal. Every single last one of us. No matter who we are, have or haven’t achieved, done or not done, no matter how selfish, magnanimous, gifted, untalented, beautiful, hideous, rich having everything, impoverished with barely anything, no matter where we were born and lived out our existence. Nothing is taken into consideration to determine whether we will die one day. Our bodies bring us in, then in due time they take us out.

In the allotted time we have in our run up to eternity, maybe it’s the opportunity to realize who we have been all along, could possibly be if we look beyond what appears real and insist on what something inside always seeks to reminds us of: our differences are a temporary illusion/delusion and are simply masks we are all donning for the costume party we are currently attending. Remove the mask and we are all made of the same stuff. Soul, spirit, those strange intangibles that can make themselves known but only if we search for them. Don’t let our separate bodies fool you. We are one, always have been one, and will someday realize our separation was to show us who we are and who we can become, for better or worse.

Our mortality should spark a desire to figure out why we are here in the first place. How we work that out, what we choose to do, determines who we ultimately become. We have this brilliant ability to make a choice. We are never locked into anything. We are way more fluid than we think we are. Neurons in our brain can keep growing. Sometimes a simple notion, a tiny embryo of an idea, can mean a brand new part of ourselves is about to be born.

Granted, it gets harder as you get older. Aging seems to harden our habits and our comfort zone starts to squeeze in on us like a cozy weighted blanket (straight jacket). But only if you let it. My belief is that we can keep growing, learning, and embrace change until our last breath. Maybe a tad idealistic, but this is somehow hardwired in me. North star facing, following a light that hasn’t let me down yet. I adamantly believe (as the REM song says) sweetness follows.

It’s estimated that our planet is 4.54 billion years old. We humans have only been living on it in one form or another for about 300,000 years. During all that time, before we showed up and thereafter, the earth has done its duty: morphed into a place to support us, spun on its axis, circled round the sun, giving us plenty of room and time to figure it all out. Whatever, whoever started this whole thing called “reality” is in no hurry to explain it. Patience is the name of the game here. Silently, something waits for us to take the time to peek behind the curtain.

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny. — Carl Schurz —