I wanted to write a piece at the start of this year that
began with New Year’s resolutions and went on to examine what and why we
resolve certain things every year at the end of the year. Some weeks have already
passed into the new year and the result of my intention has remained
incomplete. I couldn’t write a piece on resolutions without falling deeply into
sarcasm or snarky commentary so I have abandoned the project altogether. I
think I secretly intended this from the outset simply because I’m so bored with
New Year’s resolutions, the childish wish list that results from it, and the
subsequent dissolution of those well-meaning commitments days or sometimes
weeks later. By now, enough time has passed for most resolutions from most
people to have been forgotten or dropped. Fine. We are now in the midst of the
first month of the year and we are all back to business with our more ludicrous
resolutions forgotten. No matter what they were.
I also wanted to write something about Change as the new
year is indeed a moment when change is most noticeable. Most resolutions are about
changing something not surprisingly. Changing how you look is the most common.
I’ve been going through several changes myself during the waning months of last
year (none of which has anything to do with how I look) and I’m still going
through them now in the first month of the year. In my own limited way, I have
come to the conclusion that some of what I believed were the facts of life are
born and occasionally die off. One of the most striking ‘facts’ that is
beginning its death process in me is the perspective on life that I’ve carried
with me for the better part of four years. Since the financial meltdown of 2008
and the end of a way of life we thought would always be, and the subsequent
localized financial meltdown of my own life, I’ve been carrying a belief that
somehow I can get through this period of having to do without by remaining
where I am both geographically and rationally. Somehow, yet no evidence exists
to support this, I believed I could live in poverty and come out of it all the
better for the experience simply by staying who I am. It was a sort of
experiment, I made myself believe, yet circumstances removed any choice of
opting out so it was not really an experiment in living in poverty. My belief
was more a justification for the situation I had found myself in.
For nearly all, poverty is not a choice. However, I
wanted to believe that I chose this period of poverty, that my decisions had led
me to this place and they could lead me out just as easily. I’m finding this to
be my own particular version of hubris. My life now is not all ashes and rags,
however. We have enough food (most of the time), enough heat during the winter,
enough fuel for the car, etc. Moreover, my partner Robin and I share openly
with each other one specific dream. We both want to own the home we are now
renting. It is a common dream and, in fact, the basis of what most people would
call the American Dream. Both of us hold this dream very close and it is the
center of what we want in terms of material growth from our relationship. But
to make this dream a reality, many things will need to change - most of them
are ironically the root causes of our need to rent instead of having an ability
to own. All of these things, call them belief systems or individual
perspectives, stem from our belief that we don’t have much, we don’t earn much,
and poverty is a fact of life. So much so that neither of us will openly admit
to the other that we are in fact living in poverty. Purchasing a house while
living in poverty seems to be, and undoubtedly is, diametrically opposed to one
another.
If there are changes afoot for her and I, neither of us
can imagine all of them. There will be changes in the coming eleven and a half
months that neither of us can imagine, and I’m not talking about bad things
exclusively. Some will be wonderful and shockingly celebratory. If there is one
thing that needs to change in order to make all the other things that we dream
about possible, it is changing the implicit acceptance of poverty in our lives.
The abundance I seek for both of comes from doing those things that create
abundance but, more so, it comes from seeing our world for what it really is
now and consciously making the changes that will result in what we want it to
be. It started several months for me when I could no longer continue to believe
that the experiment would result in anything other than what it already had
produced: specifically, nothing.
Even though I began this piece with the assumption that
New Year’s resolutions are silly at best, and a waste of time at worst, I did
make one resolution to myself at New Year’s and I have held onto it vigorously.
It is neither silly nor a waste of time. I will make the changes that are
necessary to get Robin out of the job that is so unsatisfactory to her by the
end of the year. Having a job that does not pay you enough, wears you down at
the end of each and every day, and keeps you from finding and exploring what it
is that you should be doing in this life is what I believe I must remove first
before anything we dream of can happen. I must find a new job or other means of
earning an income that will allow her to leave; in other words, provide us with
enough money to make it possible. I have no idea what that will be. The
challenge for me is going to require some of the most profound changes that I
have ever experienced. I will need to open my mind, and creativity, in ways I
never thought possible, but surprisingly were always quite within the realm of
my abilities. I will need to accept circumstances that I believed were out of
reach. I will need to go further than this as well. I will need to grow and
that often takes a willingness to let go of things I thought were real. The New
Year is a great time for that to occur.
Wish me luck. I have already started. I have created a website focusing on journal writing. Writing in my journal has produced a great many benefits so I believed it was a good place to start. View it here at: http://penandjournal.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment