This year I made my mind up that I would not write any New Year's resolutions nor burden myself with a scheme on how to accomplish as many as I could. I am, by the way, pretty good at getting something out of resolutions though admittedly, like most, I end up frustrated over the ones I don't and thus add more to my plate the following year, or simply fence more of my life as I succumb to the notion that there are areas in my life that simply won't change.
Well, not this year. This year I will actually practice what I had hoped to do last year but was pursuaded not to. This year I will simply try to live one day at a time in regards to all those things that come my way, and consequently do that with my writing. Before I explain how--and no, I'm not going to engage in a detailed planning effort--I want to say why this approach this year. I am not, at least not now, changing my whole way of living or writing. I am simply trying out something, and that something is trying to figure who I really am as a person, scholar and writer. I want to discover what my core has come to be constructed of. One way is to simply try to respond to life's (and writing's) challenges with what is already in the barrel of my soul.
Does that mean I won't study or read new books, or put into practice things I might learn during the year? I don't really know what it means, except that I'm going to try to respond to things with those principles I already know and with those that come with my daily living. But more important, it means I will be doing those things that are important to the day. My core experiences are, of course, made up of past experiences and daily living, but I don't want to use the past as an excuse or as a reason on why I do things. Nor will I use the future as a way to justify not doing something today. In other words, each day must find its own reasoning, even if that reasoning is built on past experiences that have become engrained in my core. But because they have become engrained they are now part of my life's daily character.
If this all sounds complicated, it is. I have little notion of how to live one day at a time, having lived my life with plans, resolutions, and priding myself in being a basically well organized writer. I have benefitted greatly from planning and making resolutions each year and finding ways to implement those goals. But I've also found that each year becomes more burdened with resolutions and goals and thus each year I feel as someone who "lacks" rather than someone who has accomplished and has grown. More important, I keep wondering who I really am given that I am trying to be so many things. Now, I'm a pretty stable person and no I don't have psychological or emotion problems and I don't have a massive Hemingway writer's block. Rather I have a great desire to know what is at my core and how would I live if I had to depend on that and not on all the resources or ideas that flow out from the hundreds of ideas that I conjure up every year.
I know that for the most part I have lived my life as I wish I could, but not always have I been grateful or appreciative, usually because there is always something ahead of me to do, or something that is in the rear view mirror that I did not do. Sometimes those get in the way of simply doing and finding joy in who I am. I don't really know what it will mean for my writing or even for my learning but I do believe that it will mean greater internal peace and some surprises along the way. It will mean paying attention to things that I usually ignore in preparing for "greater things". Maybe, I can begin to write poetry which is something I've always wanted to do. Writing poetry seems to be based on the ability to live in the moment and to notice things that most people ignore, overlook, or fail to appreciate.
Periodically, I will report on what this has meant for me and for my writing. But first, I got to keep those "resolutions, plans, obsession" out of my brain, and that seems for the moment the hardest chore. But I won't make a resolution to keep them at bay, at least not this year.
