So here we are at the turning of the year. Shortest day, longest night. Time for reflection, for gratitude, for forgiveness. Time for hopes and dreams. Time for plans. Time for decision-making. Time for noticing how far I've come and setting the direction for the year ahead.
This year started with optimism, but soon turned sour with the betrayal of trust and deep despair. But there is only one way to go when you reach rock bottom. Up.
Things steadily improved. I made decisions to simply stop doing things that were not helping shape my life the way I wanted it be. I gave up Spanish (for now). I stopped teaching courses that were ill-thought out and poorly examined. I rejected a commission that I couldn't write my way into.
I took action that moved me in the right direction. I found the right people to renovate the bungalow and turn a shell into a home. I learned how to ask for help, and how to take action when people were taking the Michael, and I learned how to be alone.
And I found that the work kept flowing.
This year has been all about foundations. The foundations are laid. Now I can start to build. This year has been about designing my new life. The design is in place. Now I can start to create.
This year has been full of maybe's and perhaps. Now I'm clear. I am clear what I want. I know what it will take. Now I have to start to prove to myself that I have the discipline, the creativity, the perseverance to do it. To live it.
I want the year to come to be full of love and luck and laughter. I want it to be full of learning. I want to be wild and free, choosing my own pathway, my own projects. I want to live more healthily, returning to the essence of who I am, who somehow got lost along the way.
There is space in my life, that I would like someone to step into, but I know that the space is small and I would ask more (or perhaps less) than most would want to give, but my happiness does not depend on others, only on myself.
Here are my yardsticks for the year to come, the guidelines, the operating parameters:
Wild and free. Useful or beautiful. Love, luck and laughter. Cash-flow. Health. Vitality. Adventure. Spirit. Learning. Creativity. Reflection. Joy or pleasure or contentment. Vulnerability. Courage.
These are the bases against which I will judge my choices, the standard to which I will hold myself.
In the year to come I will focus on actions, not outcomes. I will continue to try to learn to be patient and to worry less about the things that are out of my hands, even if I will need to pick up the pieces should they be dropped.
In the year to come I will learn to trust myself, my talent, my knowledge, my resilience. All have been tried and tested and now is the time to trust.
In the year to come I will stop searching for my tribe or a place to belong. In the year to come I will claim my own place in the world and finally become what I was born to be.
In the year to come I will cope with whatever happens next – and if dealing with it means having hideaway days, not-coping-today-days, I will carve those out for myself, kindly, without self-criticism. I will take my time out. I will protect my spirt-space.
This year I have not relaxed, having forgotten how to do so without Clive's calming presence. In the year to come I will relearn the arts of sun-downing and star-gazing and dawn-watching. I will learn again how to be still by the water, and how to build castles in the air.
At the turning of the year, I find that I have already let the pain of the past go and hold only the memories that are worth the keeping. At the turning of the year, I went out to the coast to honour some of those memories. To give thanks. To notice the tides and the weather and the changes in the landscape that all remind us that everything is fleeting, everything passes away, and only few things come again.
I sat on the empty shore, as the tide, like the year, like the decade, like life, was turning. The surface of the water was breeze-dappled with a million wavelets as if all the salt-claimed souls were dancing, invisible. There were larger, gentler undulations, a swell and subside, rise and fall, like the breathing of a sea that was sleeping, oblivious. Breaths that reached the shallows shushurrating peace in a tumble of pebbles.
The gulls were way out towards the horizon, white flashes in the winter sun.
