Time to Reset
The year 2020 peeks over the horizon and gets a few glimpses of the daunting task ahead.
Meanwhile Best of…Worst of… lists are everywhere, gathering bouquets of the year’s media and events. All amplified and further pumped up since it’s not just one year, but the whole decade! It’s far too much to pay attention to, so I save for later.
The lists fill this sweet unfocused time before the New Year, when ideas, plans, and goals are sleepily shifting (maybe dancing) or drifting in and out of focus. Soon to be deployed, they are all now on holiday, raising a margarita glass with a laugh, or smiling and nodding to me holding a fine teacup, or just waving a hand to let me know they are in the room but in full relaxation mode. Present, but not yet ready to engage.
A time to reset
This is the gap time when whatever we do has little effect. Everyone seems to be in the spell of what’s been called “dead week”.
We can’t act, but only look back on the past year, or skry for the new. As the news pours in on what worked in the past decade, and what were foolish idiotic trends that we’re glad to do without, I may look, but I don’t really apply it to myself. I’m in my own rhythm, maybe it’s lunar. More likely it’s part of the mass consciousness, but with my own secret sauce. (Or do we not say secret sauce anymore? It’s so last decade.)
Best of = climate action. Worst of = climate crisis.
I’m thinking that tracking minor social shifts and changes is becoming a luxury we can no longer afford. Our lives are much more than workshops for superficial self-improvement resolutions. We are needed for bigger plans than the personal. What are we concerning ourselves with here? I keep thinking there must be some way I can take the strongest ideas and break them into tiny bite-sized daily bits that I can do in the year to come.
With my own shifting ideas, plans and goals, I want to build a pattern that can hold strong through the unexpected in the year to come, and make a sort of framework for whatever the following years may bring.
Here’s how I envision it. My focus makes a circle of these goals and plans, so they can all work together. Right now, the ideas are fading in and out, moving slowly, coming in and out of the room. They’ll just walk around together, in an easy and unforced circle at different rhythms, but moving in the same direction. Later, they’ll find their natural places to stand and be, but not yet. They’re still gathering round, coming in and out the door, some still finishing their wine, others taking an afternoon nap, some laughing in a corner before reluctantly joining the others.
It will probably be like this for another couple of days. Then at the outset of 2020, all together in their circle, they will start the decade on the right foot, with the right intention. It will be my New Year’s Revolution!
Let’s make 2020 the year it all turns around.
No words
I’m saddened and shocked to realize that hundreds of millions of animals have been lost in Australian fires. The true scope of the disaster is emerging, with ecologists reporting a heartbreaking mass loss of animals.
Ecologists from the University of Sydney now estimate some 480 million mammals, birds & reptiles have been lost by the devastating bushfires in 2019. There are now fears entire species of animals and plant life may be lost forever, with scientists moving to understand the full scope of destruction. - Sydney News
James comments on his photo of a serving bowl on its matching plate. “What can I say about it? A kind of calendar, a pattern watching over us, something that defies our interpretation and keeps it that way, something that provokes our criticism because it is cheaply made? All of the above, and life goes on.”
I want to write more to you, but this is a time of reset. I’m getting ready for what’s next, in ways I don’t recognize or fully understand yet. See you next week, or as the old joke goes, “See you next year!”
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