Happy New Year and welcome to 2014. As one friend wrote in my Christmas card about 2013, "thank fuck it's over". I have a bit of a flu, or cold, so I slept most of the night away, but I was awake to welcome in the New Year before going back to bed for another 11 hours or so. And when I woke up this morning, nothing was different. The weather is pretty mild, my friends on Facebook are still there, my pets are well, my apartment is lovely, and I feel the same about my life, my grief, and my ex-husband. Yet, when I reflect back on the past year that ripped my life apart in almost every way imaginable, I am reminded about how much can transpire in a year. When I look back over my almost 42 years of living, it seems like I have lived about four distinctly different lives already. Not that it is clockwork or tied to a century, but every seven to ten years there seems to be a massive shift in my life's direction. This is just another one, although there has never been a year so significant in my life. There has never been so many major changes over such a short time span in my history as this past year. I made it, mostly due to a handful of good friends, and I will survive. I hope that next year when I welcome you into 2015 I will have many blessings to be grateful for, beyond what I already have in my health, friends, son, the privilege of living in Canada, the safety of being a female at this time in history, the sanitation and bounty of living in a first world country, my pets, my ex-husbands generous support payments, etc.
I intend to thrive in 2014. There is a reason the universe, fate, God, Buddha, whatever you identify with and however you wish to name your higher power, has done this to my life. I know now that I wasn't on the right path, I just wish I could have taken a few people with me as I corrected my path. The losses this past year have been excruciating. They damn well near killed me. I do feel though that the start of the New Year brings one blessing if nothing else; having survived my first holiday without my ex-husband and living on my own. I am reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book David and Goliath and on my flight home from Vegas yesterday I picked up a very interesting message from the chapters I read. From dyslexic's, Martin Luther King, the survivors of the London blitz bombings by the Germans in WWII, the Doctor that made astounding breakthroughs in treating childhood Leukemia in the 1950s, to 12 of the first 44 Presidents of the United States of America, I was reminded of the saying: what does not kill you makes you stronger. When you have lost everything, or your worst fear is realized, and you discover you are still standing at the end of it, you gain a "self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage". Thank you Malcolm for that message.
That is what I will search for in the New Year. The courage to live the life I am meant to live. The courage to love again, for I miss it deeply. I miss having someone to care about and cheer on and support, and I miss having a person in my life that will do the same for me. I miss intimacy. I miss sharing goals and dreams with someone. I miss planning a future with someone. I will work hard to cultivate peace and stillness in my life. I will work hard this next year to maintain the humbleness my experiences of the past year have bestowed on me. I will work hard to develop compassion for all human beings which was sorely lacking in my last life of keeping up with the Joneses.
In the meantime, I had been busy writing to close out 2013, despite the fact I haven't published anything. It is easy for me to write: it is cathartic, therapeutic, and the words just flow out of my brain through my fingertips. The difficult part for me is editing. I am a ferocious and meticulous editor, even if I don't catch every mistake, and I can easily spend as much time, if not more, editing my writing after the fact. If it takes me two hours to write a post, I will spend at least two hours editing and correcting. So, I have many pieces written to some degree of completion, but in my depression and anxiety leading up to Christmas I did not have the willpower or strength to summons the detail orientated individual who can spend hours editing. Over the next month I intend to work hard on my recovery so that I have the energy to put my thoughts and ideas out into the Universe.
During my recent trip to Vegas I was telling my girlfriend about a few ideas I have for my next tattoo, and the one I am leaning towards is the Sanskrit spelling of Namaste. My girlfriend did not know the expression, so I explained it to her. The literal translation is I bow to you, or I bow to your form. Namaste my friend. If you have struggled this past year in any way, appreciate yourself for surviving, and may the best be ahead for you. Happy New to you. I wish you many good things.
No comments:
Post a Comment