Crushing Resolutions

I don’t set resolutions. I tune out self-improvement lists and posts. I reject positive-word-infused, thinly-veiled puritanical, personal development invitations. I started to say that it is not personal, but it is. It very much is! When I was younger, I went after everything HARD. Exercise – if you don’t hurt, it won’t work. School – straight As or bust. Massage – deep tissue, and the deeper, the better. Scared of something – face it head-on, jump in, push ahead.

Result – an aching body (still), overhyped nerves (literally although born with those, so it’s a toss-up on nature versus self-nurtured), and exhaustive burnout.

Somewhere along the way, I quit. It is really challenging to find a new way of being and truly practice it. It actually takes lots and lots of practice, which requires commitment, which can stir up the very beast you are trying to kill, so I just quit for a time. That is not as unhealthy as it sounds. (Quitting actually took its own effort and time!) Sometimes it takes time for things to die down, fallow out, before the new life can begin to emerge. And all of that time, there are still plenty of demands from life itself, so from outward appearances, activity and life continues. But within – well, there is much that is percolating, fermenting, growing…take your pick of transformational present participles.

What I know these days is that I am not alone in any of this. Find some truth, get comfortable with it, and then share it in a palatable way – others will speak up with their stories. So here is my truth, friends, in this new year in which challenges lie ahead that are personal and global, familial and political, and more than often all tangled together. 

Let us step gently into this new year. 

Let us be fierce in our resistance to that which harms and dehumanizes, and let us be kind and gentle in our embrace of that which makes us human and vulnerable. 

Let us go arm in arm. Let us encourage and uplift. 

Let us begin the conversation in the mirror and then take it to the streets, the coffee shop, the kitchen table. 

Let us breathe in the moment we have and let us live in this present gift with the firm intention of creating life-filled moments for generations to come.

This is my resolve rooted deep in my soul, anticipating tendrils of life with eyes open to seeing what form they take. Life grows in even the most challenging of environments with tending and nourishment. What nourishes you? What nourishes me? And how do we access that nourishment? 

It would seem how we answer these questions is essential to whatever it is that comes next for any of us and for all of us. I know for me -- failing to sit with these questions enough to come up with any response is a sure path back to previous results. Here's to pondering and living these questions together and sharing what spirit speaks to us.