I am increasingly enamored with the purifying powers of the New Year. With its soft gray light, January seems the perfect time to settle deep into oneself and listen. There’s a lull after the hustle of the holidays and before the abundance of spring, in which we can hear our truest intentions.
Although resolutions are what we usually talk about this time of year, intention is to me the better word. With his stiff-upper-lip quality, Mr. Resolution sits bolt upright with a G & T in one hand and a bowler hat resting on one well-pressed knee. Intention, on the other hand, is a warm shawl to wrap around oneself as we step into situations that we know might be difficult but are ultimately renewing and strengthening. It is the desire to do something we feel is right as opposed to the will to do something the world deems to be correct.
Without mindfully sitting down to write about the New Year, ideas have been coming to me for weeks: changes I’d like to make in the coming months and years—hopes for myself, my family, and the world and small acts of grace that just sound right when I say them out loud. I have been thinking of the ways that I’m not satisfying myself, especially my creative self, that part of me that is central to who I am yet who often has to settle for the shabbier real estate while my kids get Board Walk and Park Place.
How can I fill those places that felt empty or under used. Cleaning up my writing space (something I mentioned a few columns back and am embarrassed to admit remains undone) is an obvious one, but I’d also like to trigger my brain in new ways. Learn something new, was quickly refined to: learn now to make doughnuts and knit a scarf. Both feel satisfying and homey, talents that will feed me and those around me.
Being in the world, connected to others more completely than standing in the grocery line, is also key. As a freelancer and often single parent, it’s easy to become unattached. I wrote in my journal—feeling a tad self-conscious to write something so ridiculously large—what more can I do for the world? I do a lot already. I mean, I sort my recycling, write the occasional letter to the editor, and keep four people in clean underwear, for Pete’s sake! But what might feel more inspired and less expected? What might I be able to look back on and relish years from now? Make more beauty, I wrote. And then: carry a camera and get reacquainted with drawing. These things might not seem like they’re for the world, but those who look deeply at the world, its delights and scars, are the ones who often end up doing great good.
PREVIOUS PAGE
