Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. ~ Steven Wright
I don't make resolutions on the first of the year - or the last day of the year - at all - ever - not anymore. It's too embarrassing to see them listed in an old journal and repeated in other old journals, all those intentions that led to lots of grief and no new behaviors or deep growth. I wonder how to strike the balance between accepting who I am and challenging myself to learn something new and maybe wonderful.
Why do you stay in prison / when the door is so wide open? / Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. / Live in silence. ~ Rumi
It's more about moments than about long-term. More about spontaneity than resolution. I do have some habits that came about because I wanted to focus on what I love about my life instead of berating myself over what I don't have. So every night I list what I'm grateful for from that day. I make myself list five things (people) and usually stop counting after 10. Being grateful has become a new age cliche, but you know what? It works. It helps me fall asleep and it brings me home to myself.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me. ~ Anna Quindlen
As this new year opens, I'm making lists of people I love and things I love and activities and food and books and whatever pops into my head. With each list, I get excited, and one item on a list engenders a whole new tumbling river of where to go and what to do.
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. ~ A.A. Milne
So I'm starting this year with curiosity. Less thinking and more wondering. That's a resolution worth considering.
The more you think about things, the weirder they seem. Take milk for example. Why do we drink COW milk? Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, "I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em." ~ Bill Watterson, from Calvin and Hobbes
