New year, new chapter in my journal, new day . . . same old me. Same old me, which means . . . a non-ending inquiry into life, a relentless drive to ascend, to develop and raise my consciousness within my human limitations. I think there’s never really much the same in me in terms of development while my embodied human is steeped in the routinization of living . . . I make the same tea every morning, quite happily, I might add. I sit in the same place to write, brush my teeth the same way, and find there are myriad details that I perform in much the same way upon waking and living through every passing day. All that sameness surrounding my interior thought world and emotional life which is anything but statically repetitive. Inwardly I am like an ever-moving machine spiraling around the seasons and cycling of the repeated activity with a seeking searching engine digging deeper and further in to the inquiries of meaning in our existence. Nothing same about all that.
I find a peculiar kind of solace in the inherent movement within the very pragmatic and completely ethereal realities of our existence. The truly interesting thing is that we can’t really have one without the other . . . The one provides the molecular/protoplasmic basis to house that which provides the meaning for the other’s existence. It’s a chicken/egg thing, resonating with our very bi-polarity in sight, ambulation and thinking. We are embodied yin/yang, the essence of the dynamic.
Where is all this going? I have no idea. I don’t know where this day is going, much less this year. It’s a new start--we all like that, don’t we? And, yet, when you think about it, it’s just another day and every one is a new start as is every breath that emanates from our lungs, every second that ticks on our clocks. I think this ‘new start’ stuff is really nothing more than a fabricated crutch we all seem to need and have co-opted for the BIG new start to happen on January 1st. Nothing wrong with a crutch when you really need one. Anybody with a broken bone in their leg will testify to that. It’s the crutch we get in the habit of using that we don’t need that might become problematic . . .
I do this thing myself, look ahead to an eventual new beginning and catalog certain activities and events for that time. It’s a useful skill for planning projects, etc. and very detrimental when postponing things that would enhance my life if I just did it instead of thinking about it and tucking it into a particular point on the calendar because it’s . . . the beginning of the week, the beginning of the year, and so on and on until the years roll by and an old woman looks back at me in the mirror. Who is that?
Costco and other savvy retailers know this and use it well. Why else would the warehouses and stores be full of organizational tools and storage containers as well as every fitness DVD, book, and body enhancing machine known to man on January 1st? New year’s resolutions . . . the, “I’ll get to it in the new year” hypnosis. Nothing is magically going to kick in to get all that stuff done that we’ve put off til, and here it is--the magical component in our thinking associated with a new start. For most people, most of the time, it’s bullshit, and very human bullshit--there’s an oxymoron for you! We all do it to a degree and for me there’s no shame in it, and there is opportunity.
I think it’s possible to recognize the patterns of magical thinking and clean out our brain activity and our emotional rodeos. We can take a look at the propensity to hold off engaging in that which is important for our lives in lieu of an external cycle, stimulant, ‘crutch’ that will, we hope, give us the impetus to work on our lives. My question to myself and others is this . . . If it’s not worth doing now, will it really be worth it just because it’s a new year? A new Day? A new month? The obvious fallacy of this reasoning is the dependence on that which is yet to be--time. We fool ourselves into thinking we ‘have’ time, that it will be there for us. I suspect this is the greatest illusion in our lives.
I tell myself the truth to the very best of my discerning capacities. The truth that I have for myself and perhaps others on this first day in 2010 is simply this--don’t wait to act upon that which you know is calling you. The only time to do my life is now. There just might be a day when I look into the mirror and see either a puzzled, regretful look on an old woman’s face, or an impish smile replete with memory. The moment of that eventuality is not down the road, it is in this very moment. If I were to have a religion it would be this . . . Living in such a way as to have no regret.
That’s what this artist is thinking about today . . .
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