I feel conflicted this morning about the new year. I always love this time, this kind of slow march toward change, and love the fresh beginning the new year usually provides...but this year, I feel a little lost. I am more scared than I have ever been for what the new year is going to bring. I am not able, at least without sufficient work, to really conjure up a lot of positive feelings about where this world is heading. To be honest, I kind of feel like the world, all at once is not so slowly losing its mind. And I feel that way too about myself, my life and my choices. I do not have any delusions about 2022, it is going to have its fair share of shitshows, fuck ups and sadness. It isn’t going to be the best year ever, it is going to be a year...just like any other.
I am bummed that I am not getting my new year high this year. But I am also ok with it. Perhaps this is a more authentic start. It also feels like too long a period of time to be excited about or dread, equally. With the way the world is going lately, I am thinking that it might be best for all of us to just stay in the day and not get too far out there. I mean, Betty White planned her 100th birthday party and then died just days before. I can’t even explain how upset I am that she is gone.
It feels like there is so much death right now. So many people dying, not just of COVID either. Cancer and car accidents are really giving COVID a run for its money. It makes me sad on a variety of levels. I am worried about the world...I am sad, scared and unsure of my own life and that is the most stable thing I know...which likely terrifies more than one of you.
But this year, like any year, gives us an opportunity to pull ourselves back within our selves and can show us what we can do to make positive changes in the world. Right now, I feel a darkness creeping, not so silently either, around us all. I am not trying to be dramatic, I just feel it. And I see it, in my life and those about me. People are on edge. People are hurting. People seem to just not give a fuck anymore. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I could relate at times.
All I know to do is to practice spiritual principles and continue to hold myself accountable for the myriad of ways that I fail to be a moral human. I can see that my fuck ups are here to help me grow, and it is only my stubborn refusal to look at myself unvarnished, that will assure that I get worse, not better.
So on this new day in this new year, I am sitting with myself in all my tainted glory and really taking stock in what I see. And what I see most is a broken person who is trying to find her way. I see how lost I am, I see how I really don’t know much of anything at all. I see how I am just here, showing up and trying. And I see that my greatest gift to those about me is to never let apathy take me under. To never let myself off the hook where I think that I have done enough work, enough change that I can just sit back and relax and say, “I am good.”
I am not good. I am a being in motion, changing all the time, constantly, working and trying and striving and hoping beyond all hope that I never become complacent in my aspiration to be, me, but better.
It is my path towards my own brokenness that has given me the life I have today. Embracing all my screw ups, all my issues, all my baggage. And I can see that the character defect that plagues me still is honesty. It is so hard for me to be honest with you about who I am, because I am not all that sure myself.
But, on this first day of 2022, I commit myself to doing the hardest thing I have ever done. Saying what I want, what I feel and what I think, really. Honesty is going to be my cross to bear in 2022, I see it so painfully clearly. So buckle up, it is going to be a bumpy ride. The podcast starts on Monday...and I don’t know what to say about it except, it is honest. And a little brutal...
I can’t change the world, and I am not even able to bring much light to the darkness I feel encroaching, but I can do my best to change the things I can, and for me, this year, it is going to be about saying it, feeling it and living it with as much integrity as I can...
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