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…