Happy new year, dear readers! What a year it’s been. We’ve very palpably been in it together, haven’t we? Do you have anyting, personally, to be proud of? Anything you’ve learned? Most of my endeavours (acquiring a motorcycle driver’s licence, finish editing my book, learning to do a hand-stand, to mention a few) failed. But I did survive. Even thrived a little. I know now that I am capable of holding a full-time, physically straining job and commute by bike 20 kilometres every day.
I discovered the limits of how far it is possible to push my body, what happens when I transcend them, and how to gradually stretch them. I finally got my sleep-schedule under control. I concluded that physical activity and being outdoors is so essential to my well-being that this is what I ought to build my life around. That leaves room for a lot of different possibilities, but it is the beginning of that direction I’ve been searching for so frantically.
Turns out it what I really had to do was just to allow myself to be as present as possible in my physical shape, and listen to the body’s deep-down cravings. That’s a lesson more valuable than any number of successful achievements, I reckon. So next year I’ll let this be my compass: presence, contact, trust, sustainability, and at the centre of it all the body. Screw resolutions. This is my new way forwards.
If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give it. Live for this, wretched being that you are.
— Anne Rice (Queen of the Damned)
Love and hope,
Winterdragon
