Reflections

2014 snuck up on me. Some of the items on my 2013 wish list still stand unfulfilled, but I am determined to give them another try in 2014. To keep an ideas notebook, I have a very noisy brain, the kind that I am trying to make peace with, rather than silence. Particularly in moments of euphoria, ideas zoom through it and most of them remain uncaptured, evading me in the moments of calm when I try to revisit them.

In Summer 2013 it seemed like the perfect moment to slow down and start jotting down the thoughts born out of elation or enthusiasm before they became too fleeting to ground. The pages of that idea notebook are still admittedly blank. I still want to give it a try though in 2014, because I want the mornings after ideas to be just as alive and enlivening and salient. Then there were the wishes that remained unfulfilled in 2013, but I am willing to let them just stand as such. They either became less relevant as the year passed or I grew more ready to live without them. I never found the perfect rock, or a Greek island onto which to perch my elbows, or hold the ability to firmly derive my identity, nor did I send as many handwritten letters as I had promised myself I would. I wrote a new column in 2013, but I never quite went through with the clicking submit and having it all evaluated by a literary agent first in a manner of seriousness.

Unlike some, there are those items at which I failed abjectly, and disappointingly. Worry less nope I worried more. I had wanted 2013 to be the year of the exhale. I knew then, as I know now, that a human being cannot go on worrying at the level and meticulousness that I do. I was aware that it was time to let go of some of the anxiety, of the post - traumatic stress, of the grief, of the intensity of all of my conflict zones, of the emotional minefield that I did not know (or want) to do unemotionally. 

2013 endowed me with journeys, novelty, fireworks - and some exhales, too. But I was naive to think that those would come without more moments that cut an inhale short, trigger a gasp, or make me hold my breath till I turned blue in the face. Exhaling was beautiful and needed, but if I am to keep writing, and reflecting, and living with grave intention - then I need to learn not only to wish for the exhale, but also to master creating it for myself and living patiently within the moments that render it elusive. I failed miserably at worrying less this past year. In the scheme of life, this is a more costly failure than having failed at other items on the wish list. I am slowly realizing that in my life, item #1 on my wish year from year to year will continue to be Worry Less, until it, too, is rendered unnecessary. Until this wish has been scratched off my list, edged off by other priorities, sufficiently conquered, or - perhaps more realistically - until I make better peace with all around me.

For 2014 I want to be befallen in relationship that melts anxiety, such that elbows can sit steady and skirted legs can plant themselves firmly on salted ground and hair can billow in the wind and I can hold my breath long enough to defeat any and all blurriness, ceaselessly dance on tabletops, sing my lungs out to Adele, as Rumor shouts in the background, throw hello parties, and farewell parties to my nomadic life without supporting solo cups and cheap wine.

Always have I been attached to the documentation and the rituals of recording memories. Different notebooks held disparate thoughts across eras of my life, with their pages threaded together, from notes, to conflict, to poetry, to endless nights of noted worry. Notebooks have been the only possession of mine that have traveled everywhere, truly everywhere, stretching suitcases until they bloat.

January 2014 was the beginning of a new notebook, for no other reason other than its predecessor running out of pages...it begins with outlines of hope, some laughably simple, some a bit shaky, and some dragged along strapped to my shoulder, the challenge of not their weight, but of their own merited nobleness...so here I go again, reflecting on a self whom thought she could drown grief with affection, thus making the grief immutable....