Happy New Years

Do you make new years resolutions?

For the first five years of my adulthood I asked everyone I knew and met that question when this time of the year rolled around. I needed to figure out who I wanted to be in regard to this particular ritual.

There’s so much I like about New Years Resolutions – but over and over again – I’ve made them and failed to keep them. Occasionally one or two (out of ten or eleven) have stuck, but enough failures have governed my expeience of the new years resolution that every few years I swear them off altogether.

This year – they seem like an embodiment of hope. You know, the endless possibility that we’ll manage to do something better.

One thing is for sure – I’m going to always stay devoted to my new tradition (sorta new anyway) New Years Reflection.

Today I glanced back through a bunch of journaling that I did during the summertime, all my old blogs (something like 100 pages in word – I guess I’ve written a book), some of my tenure documents, my perennially amended “List of Thirty Things I Want to do Before I Die” and other scraps of reflection from previous years. I sewed them all together in a 25 page document in order to spare YOU, dear reader, from reading all the things I’m thinking about in regard to myself, the world, and change (because that’s what New Years is about right?).

In the end, I ended up with QUESTIONS instead of RESOLUTIONS. I really like this idea. It’s more my groove.

1. How can I increasingly faithfully tell stories to the audiences I have? How can I faithfully tell stories in a way that will develop my voice?
2. How can I bring SHALOM and JUSTICE to the people who live around me?
3. How can I sustain an identity comfortable in the interstices & devoted to the margins while still participating in the life of the institutions with which I’m engaged?
4. (to those around me) What do you want next? What do you want most?

I love this last one. It’s a question that welled up in a journal on my birthday last year.

I think I’ve failed more profoundly with that one than all the others (perhaps because it’s the one that I’m best equipped to do) these last five or six months – but that’s a different list. Not for the blog. You thought my sincerity posting “ouch” from a few weeks ago was painful – just imagine the tasteless solipsism of being subjected to a list of GREATEST FAILURES FROM THIS YEAR. But I have hope. Loads of it.

Hope you’re off to a good start thus far in 2004. Been thinking of you lots lately (unless I don’t know you, in which case, I speculate about you a lot.)

peace~