I know I'm not alone when I say I can't believe it's 2020. I'm not entirely sure where 2019 actually went - some of it I spent laying in a hospital bed in my living room after pretty serious surgery on Ye Olde Zombie Knee (and many of those hours were spent in a daze of painkillers and the occasional CBD gummy), so I suppose this accounts for a few months of the year. But where the hell did the rest of it go??
Towards the end of the year, I found my creative life was starting to pick up a bit. Both Kate and I were involved in a large-scale Halloween event at Fort Edmonton Park (www.fortedmontonpark.ca if you're interested in learning more about what the Park is), and then I rolled almost immediately in to working on a Christmas Pantomime for the Capitol Theatre (also with Fort Edmonton Park). I was able to return to my hometown of Winnipeg in September for my aunt's wedding, and spent some time with old pals from my University of Manitoba days. July and August were a blur of Fringe Festival rehearsals, shifts and performances.
Okay, so... maybe 2019 WAS actually a busy year for me. But I still entered 2020 feeling like I accomplished very little in the previous 365 days, and it has left me with a sense of... of... I don't even know, but it's not necessarily something I find positive. And I'm not sure which is sitting less kindly with me - the idea that I personally don't feel I accomplished much in 2019, or that I'm allowing myself to sit in this feeling. Which would be worse for you?
Scrolling through my feeds on various social media platforms, I have seen a bajillion posts and memes about the new year, resolutions, year-end reviews complete with photos, and I can't help but wonder if I've lost my ability to find the joy and magick in the clock striking midnight on December 31st, and the possibilities that lay before me in the new year. Dare I question whether I even care about it anymore? It's hard to say right now. But I did see one post that made me stop and think for a few minutes... in a nutshell, it states that resolution implies the need to solve a problem, and I should no longer think of myself as a "problem", which then negates the need to set (and repeatedly fail) established resolutions. A resolution-free new year? Is this even possible? I've spent the last 2.5 decades believing that without setting resolutions, my Royal Ball would disappear completely as the clock strikes 12am, and everything I hold dear to me will just cease to exist, leaving me sitting in a garden patch with a tattered dress and bare feet. I AM THE PROBLEM. Everything about me is something to be fixed.
So I sit and ponder whether making a list of things I want to solve about myself is a worthwhile exercise, or something that will make me feel worse and sad and depressed and anxious and lonely and and and. I mean, if I resolve to rid myself of, say, my trifecta of mental illness, am I just setting myself up to fail? If I decide that 2020 will be THE year that I finally lose all the extra "baby weight" that I have been lugging around (let's be honest, I was dragging this around BEFORE I had my kids), will that suddenly solve all the other problems I embody?
I can count my successes on two hands... my failures are an entirely different story, with a number I have long since stopped tracking. So what am I setting myself up for?
All around us, the world is falling apart. Australia is on fire. The US is under the thumb of an orange wannabe dictator. The refugee crisis continues to grow, despite the appearance of a less-interested media. Climate change IS REAL. We're witnessing the devastation of our selfishness and greed on a scale like never before, environmentally, economically, and energetically. We're grinding our planet in to dust, and in the process, running ourselves in to the ground. This is bad. This is really, really bad.
On that note...
I've decided that 2020 is going to be the year I buck tradition. Often one to go against popular trends (most of the time the trends didn't FIT, so I wasn't invited to those parties anyway), I'm going to face the next 363 days with nothing more than open eyes, an open heart, and an open mind. If I lose weight, fine. If I don't, also fine. (For those of you who would argue that weight loss = healthy, I hear you. I'm just not joining your rally right now.) If I find my dream job, great! If I don't, also great - work is money, and money is critical for raising my children and paying those pesky bills, so a job is a job is a job right now. If I create art, fabulous! If I don't create art, it's not a reflection of my failure as an artist. Maybe I just haven't been struck with creative inspiration worth following yet. I will continue being kind. I will continue being generous. I will continue being supportive. These are aspects of my personality that have rewarded me as well as made me fall apart - but that's no reason to cut them out.
And finally...
There's a popular practice within the New Age/Witch/Heart communities to pick a word that you will embody for the year. I've picked words in the past that I felt reflected my goals for the coming months; words like love, peace, hope, etc etc etc. This year, my word is BE. There's a delicious flexibility to the word "be". It invites me to take stock of where I am at any given moment in the next 12 months, and just BE for a few minutes. Be happy. Be sad. Be peaceful. Be filled with rage. Be wide awake. Be tired. Just BE. Whatever I be is me.
Whatever. I. Be. Is. Me.
So much love,
M.
Comments