A new year. But what’s new about it? The same old fretful dithering, over health, politics, family issues repeated over generations. Why bother to make new resolutions when the lists from more than seventy new years, yellowed and frayed around the edges, still remind me of my always unfulfilled potential.
But wait! Look, right there. The sun glinting like that on a single wet pine needle! That image is new, in this new year, for sure.
So perhaps it is in the fresh, immediately experienced moments or things or ideas or whatever that I may find my way forward into this inevitably given newness of life, this new year, enumerated artificially by the ancient bean counters as 2017.
Automatically the habitual thought patterns react: OK! A fresh start, you can do it! Just one drawing a day, just one journal entry a day, just one hour of piano practice, just twenty minutes of exercise, just one note or phone call, just one flowerbed weeded, just one unpaid bill fussed over, and already I am done in. Lists, of things to do, pleasant or unpleasant, automatically feeds the beast of things undone, and I am abed with malaise, inertia. Depression or hopeless resignation can’t be far behind.
But wait! There! The sound of the tea kettle, the scent of the tea, the taste, familiar but fresh, waking me up. Wake up! The best spiritual advice ever. Just wake up and look around. Listen. Touch. Taste. Be here. Let it be enough. Let it be. As it is. Savor. Experience. Acknowledge whatever it is, however it feels. Say hello to it. Make room for it. Imagine dancing with it instead of wrestling with it. Most of all, be grateful that you get to be here to notice it, whatever it is.
Yes, that’s another list, to be sure. But from this list different habitual patterns can emerge. Creativity, for me, feeds on that sort of list, that slant of insight. In sight. Sighting along the slant of a pine needle, I find newness of vision, external and internal.
A new year! How unpredictably unfolding! Let me be here. Let me be in it. Let me, indeed, help create it, with a new, fresh presence, moment by moment.
Well, alright. That has obviously turned itself into a new new year’s resolution, already yellowing around the edges though it may be.
So let it be. It is. Let it be enough. Let me be. As is, me. Enough.
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