And then the inevitable question is raised: where do I begin?
It’s quite tempting to do an assessment of my 2012 Must-Accomplish list (yes, it’s a must-accomplish list and not quite a list of resolutions so that the move forward is not solely based on improving what could have been done better in the past but actually includes setting new never-even-imagined-i-could-do goals for the self) and then write my way towards my 2013 Must-Accomplish list but that’s an easy route to take. Apparently, I tend to look for more complicated paths.
Or not. Yeah. Let’s just get started whichever way and get this over and done with.
So maybe I should begin by saying that I’m still as fickle minded and as insanely self-conscious as I have always been. There’s nothing to change about that since there isn’t really any harm being done, except that the writing tends to extend itself and maybe I should save some space and stop arresting myself in every sentence that follows. (Aaand here I go again. And again.)
Don’t we all want to just make sure we’re doing everything the way it should be done while at the same time giving ourselves the liberty to plunge into the next spontaneous adventure, eyes closed and breaths held? Yes, that may have sounded kind of contradictory at some point and while maybe a fraction of the population are just on either ends of the spectrum, the majority would be working for a healthy mix of the certain and uncertain in their lives. Yes, you can schedule when you’re going to jump off the cliff but on the splitsecond that your feet leave solid ground, time and space may cease to exist. There’s only you, the jump, and the fall. The next thing you know, you’ve landed somewhere far more awesome than where you came from.
I look at the list which I wrote at the back of my first journal from last year and realize that if I use it as the sole measure of the past year’s fulfillment, then I would emerge as an utter failure. I was only able to achieve a third of the list, 15 out of 45 things I set out to accomplish for myself. One would consider it a total booboo especially if I say that I don’t even remember having written more than half of it. But, see, that was the actual game plan. To list, forget, live, then reflect.
A friend shared with me before that he would write his list of goals for the year and hide it away only to look at it after 365 days and see what he’s been able to achieve. If there were things he could tick off the list, he was extremely happy to be able to do so. As for the rest of the items that remain to be accomplished, then they are just that, carry-overs to the new year’s list. There’s no room for regret or should-have-could-haves because the list was merely a push to pump up the start of the year. The rest of the 365 days, you live life as you should, present in every moment and not just tied down to lists and schedules. We already have so many tasks that take up space in our planners every day, we don’t have to use a row of boxes wanting check marks to live each day by.
Up until Christmas eve, I still couldn’t feel the spirit of the holidays. Not because I was nursing an inner Grinch but because I just could not believe that it was December already. I was telling a friend two days before the new year that I feel like there should be two more weeks to the month just to allow myself to wrap up everything that have taken place. So many things have happened in 2012 and so much more could have happened. But nothing that happened or didn’t happen makes me feel bad that it did or didn’t. Every single day I would have as it was lived.
There are things that take place without any planning it. These things could even bear more value than even the biggest goal you set out to conquer for the year. In the 45 items in my list, not even half of it could compare to the best moments of my 2012. All the surprises of random opportunities to move into new directions, befriend strangers, get your hands into work you think you will never do, and even the plummet to bottoms you didn’t think would be dug up for you, proved to be the awesome and highly necessary rollercoaster ride that is 2012. I look back and think that it just couldn’t have ended so soon.
This is my twenty-fifth year. When I thought I would set out to do one thing, I find myself in action at so many other things that I could do and that need to be done. It doesn’t mean an overhaul of my passions or the abandon of a predisposed purpose. It is merely embracing the true essence of the possible. “Who would have thought…” would be my favorite reflective phrase for the moment. Certainly, not I, and gladly so. Honestly, I’m still grappling with every experience from the last twelve months, writing and rewriting every tale, hoping to archive each memory. I don’t know if I ever really could or if I even should, but then this entry, and every past entry I have, published here or otherwise, is evidence to the tremendous year that was.
So for this year I still made a list. I actually even have a timeline for this year, carefully cutting up the twelve months into four quarters and assigning major goals in each time frame. But that’s that. An attempt to imagine my 2013. In every shot to grab life by the neck, another head will just pop up. Then it’s an entirely new geste altogether. And then there’s another aspect of yourself you will discover, another chance for you to extend your capacity as a being of the universe, to live bigger, live fuller and measure the year beyond its 365 days.
And as Fiona Apple put it,
Be kind to me or treat me mean,
I’ll make the most of it
I’m an extraordinary machine.