Yeah. It’s that time of year. I believe in clean slates, start-overs, and sharp new pads of paper to make lists on. I used to like the start of the school year, or the new semester, for just the same reason. Begin at the beginning, begin as you mean to go on, and who knows what cool things could happen?
Lots and lots, to my way of thinking.
The hard part is when the world is open before you, and it’s like looking down on the Grand Canyon from the South Rim. Which way do you go? What do you do first? Which path should you take. Acutally, there are no shoulds here, but there are options, just acres of them. It feels a lot like watching “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” when the couple (as I recall) returns to their little apartment on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where their options are limited, and the world doesn’t feel quite so open ended and scary.
Because it’s scary you know, to have all that available to you and suddenly, the choices you knew you would take the moment you had the chance suddenly up and dissapear in a puff of smoke. It’s much easier, when you’re stuck in an office job, to say, I’ll do thus and such…when I have time. That office job gives you something to push against, something to be defiant to.
So, in response to that, New Year’s Resolutions offer a kind of do-over, a kind of limitation to what the world can offer. I’ve got the usual, as I’m sure everyone does, stuff like, stick to the budget, exercise more, eat more broccoli, have the rasberries and sugar and cream without quite so much sugar and cream, but it’s tough. Tough when you are your own boss for a bit longer, to stick to a schedule nobody sets for you but you.
I’ve got me a schedule, and I’ve got goals. I didn’t participate in the November Writing Month project, but then I never do. Not when every month is writing month, which in my case, it is. Do I….have a word count as a goal? Or a time limit? Do I walk every day for 30 minutes, regardless? One peice of fruit or two? What’s worked in the past?
My sister says, “You gotta want it. That’s it.” There’s no getting worked up to do it, no schedule, no list that is ever going to replace just wanting it. But what about that puff of smoke that everything you thought you want vanished into?
See? Going round and round in circles. So my answer here is, “Act as if.” Or, my other favorite quote from “My Dream of You,” by Nuala O’Faolain, which is the story of a travel writer who finds her dream life: Waiting in a beautiful little stone cottage in Ireland for her lover to visit her. The lover is married, of course, and somehow, the dream that the character wanted, and which has come true, is not enough. She talks to a friend, and he tells her, “Do the active thing.” In other words, don’t spend your life waiting for some married guy to visit you just so you can have the perfect screw. Go LIVE your life. So she does. It’s a very satisfying resolution to her problems. I like to think of it whenever I’m stuck. Do the active thing.
So here, the active thing is writing, and walking, and going to those line dances I always say I want to go to. I even have the shoes. Do the active thing, act as if, and everything else will follow.