Wonderers Heart » Dreams

2012 and I just don’t know what to do with myself…

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:49:54 +0000

I am standing at the front door of 2012, the new year begins. The threshold I describe, the start of another year, is a just a dot on the time continuum and even so days ahead feel full of possibility. Jung used a phrase I liked when he said he was living, “an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities”. Anything is possible, and I am not sure what to do…

I find it increasingly uncomfortable to be asked what I do, it always a polite inquiry but the question confounds me. I respond by talking about what I have done in the past, I don’t know what will come next, I expect to work it out.

I have a compass, in that directionally I am pulled in certain ways. I have no path, the beginning of January is a starting point but I don’t have a fixed destination. I’m looking to myself for something more or different this year, more than before, and it hard to know what I moving towards.

“Are we there yet? Are we there?” I would ask my Dad from the back-seat of the car, when I got impatient with the trip. This journeyman has spent a long time travelling, and I am still trying to determine who I am and how my life will be made most meaningful- in an ongoing curious sort of way.

The things that excite me are are also the most scary, the unknown and the unexplored and so it’s easy to feel daunted before even trying anything.

I keep thinking back to a favourite quote “Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don’t know what it is….” from Russell Hoban’s book, Riddley Walker. It reminds me of how little of my life to now has been planned or, if I did sketch out a plan at any stage, how little I have kept to plan.

I’m heartened by Julie Diamond’s New Year reflection, she is looking forward to a year living selectively: “Choosing what’s meaningful and letting go of what’s not central…”

A friend also wrote about how much courage it takes to step in the direction life pulls us in, how much awareness it takes to understand if it is or isn’t your path, and how much courage it takes to walk your own uncharted path. I hope I am brave.

I expect to find my way in 2012 one tentative step at a time…

Learn people better, Dream good, Stay glad

admin — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:08:09 +0000

Woody Guthrie was an American folk singer, most renowned for his songs penned and sung during the Great Depression. New Years Rulins were found in one of his journals and dated January 31st 1942.

I’m adopting many of Woody’s resolutions as my own, so many things I would wish to anyway do in 2012.

http://www.woodyguthrie.org/newyearsrulins.htm

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling.

I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built.

I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.”
Cray, Ed (2004). Ramblin Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: W. W. Norton & Company

..and I am out to dream good. Thanks Woody Guthrie.

Try to be a little kinder – a resolution

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:12:54 +0000

I have a resolution for the New Year, and beyond, to be kinder. It’s a resolution, a wish, a practice, a dream, and will be even more central to my way of life. I’m planning to change the world, starting with me, in the smallest and most gentle way with kindness, creating little ripples of care, respect and acceptance.

It will be magical…

I resolve to try to be kinder to myself, I resolve to try to be kinder in my role as daughter, sister, aunt, neighbour, friend, confidante, leader, manager, consultant, colleague, consumer, constituent, blogger, facilitator, learner, trainer… in every role.

I expect be fully occupied by the task, and growing.

I am indebted to a wonderful Facebook friend in Copenhagen, who inspired me by posting a status that included the latter part of this quote by Aldous Huxley:

“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder”.

It is no more difficult than that, and I intend making kindness a sustained practice in keeping with the emergent global imperative for sustainability, and my own high dreams for a world I want to live in.

Happy New Year