"There are years that ask questions, and years that answer"
Zora Neale Hurston
I hope this note finds you coiled in a tight ball of hope for another new year. 2009 was a year of surprises, transitions, celebrity silliness, and serious, even seismic shifts in our assumptions and beliefs about certainty, jobs, success, the global economy, and our very sense of the future.
It may be time for a Reboot, that faithful three finger salute known to all Windows users. We can shrug and surrender, or we can decide to reengage in this New Year using the muscular wisdom of our life experience. Leaders often disappoint us, sudden loss clutches away our heart and spirit, and change always keeps us off balance.
But, as I have discovered, we must find a way back. I think we discover it through the affection of friends and wise partners, the persistent love of family, the passion for ideas, the new, the elusive, surprising insight that opens up possibilities, the simple pleasures of a new horizon in a city you thought you knew, a warm bed, a call or card from someone you've missed, the delight of rediscovering a book you'd thought you'd lost. I invite you to hit Control/Alt/Delete to jumpstart some new ways of being.
May this be your year for the delight in discovering something you've postponed or forgotten yours again. I wish for you a year when you finally know what you have to do. To try. To become. There are always storms and the wind pries hope away. But, we can choose to find a new voice, which, as Mary Oliver writes, "you slowly recognize as your own/that kept you company/as your strode deeper and deeper/into the world/determined to do/the only thing you could do."
I write to bring order and understanding to my new world. We each must find a practice to sustain our attention and sharpen our awareness. It all goes by too quickly unless we do.
I would also hope you'd move beyond To Do lists, too, and instead make a To Become List for 2010.
Bring your passion and purpose back. Shape your world as you would have it. And have fun, too. That's the fuel. That's my challenge for the year, too.