What’s Another Year?

Flint & Steel Full Circle Writing Challenge

Around we go again. The summer drawing to a close announces another voyage around the sun as my friend and I discuss similar themes in our regular coffee shop haunt.

“That sounds familiar,” I laugh, “it must be August!” as really musts pepper the conversation. We talk about most subjects, though there are a few points that return annually to bring a shape to the year. It might seem, from an outside perspective, that we are stuck in ourselves doomed to repeat the same things, but on reflection, so much has changed and so have we. Considering that the world was on hold for a long time, during which it appeared that hope had run away and we wondered if anything would ever change, it is amazing to see where we are now.

Around me, people make decisions that directly affect my present and future. My children keep growing older (well, we do keep feeding them) and my father is ready, at 91, to up sticks and move back to Ireland. As I live with him now, my future is uncertain, as perhaps it has been for a long time. It appears to me that every time I form a sort of plan for my future that life in return doesn’t just give me plain lemons; it delivers explosive ones! I have been, not too long ago, in the place of feeling depressively sorry for myself and wallowing in dark places, but this time around, something is different.

The future is unclear for me in many ways, but somehow my connection to ego is a lot less than it has been before. Perhaps those books my friend and I read “The Courage to be Happy” and “The Power of Now” by Tolle Eckhart among them have had an influence digested at a tumultuous time when everything fell away? “Where is the joy?” is also a question that continues to resonate, encouraging a more positive way of looking at current positions. We went to see Rob Bell’s current tour recently, which didn’t influence, but certainly emphasised for me, the outlook that everything comes and everything goes. Change is inevitable even when it seems it isn’t.

It can certainly feel, from a certain two-dimensional point of view, that we have returned to a very similar place to where we were last year, but the reality is very different. I am optimistic that we haven’t come full circle, but we are on a spiral upward. We must be growing and changing if we are to be alive — even if it really doesn’t feel like it sometimes!

A response to https://readmedium.com/challenging-you-to-write-full-circle-6daaffcd380f