This time

I am not going to pretend that 2012 was a banner year.

Or that I've gained immense wisdom from surviving the more brutal parts of it.

Maybe I will someday.

Or maybe this will just be something I stumbled through, somehow. 

But I will say this: the place I am in at the end of this year is markedly different from the one I was in at the end of last year. And the comparison is not comforting.

The things I achieved in 2012 were largely external. And the transitions I was required to make were not gentle.

2011 had been a year of moving off of the conveyer belt I'd always been on. It was a year of opting out. Of making my own choices. Of envisioning a different way to live. My way. It was the year I finally met myself. A woman I'm not sure I've seen much of in 2012.

Returning to the Christine Center every New Years Eve is both comforting and painful. It is a powerful enactment of how I want to live my life, and, this year anyway, a difficult reminder of how far I've strayed. Literally and figuratively. Having traveled more than a thousand miles, I come home here like a winter-starved rabbit, shaking and thin, aware of how precious this community has become to me. And still, once I enter, the vortex opens and everything else falls away.

The middle way is about experimenting with our choices and realizing when we've gone too far in one direction or another. I spent much of 2012 surviving. Surviving my program. Surviving my move. Surviving a rigorous conference circuit. Surviving my grief. And survival feels like a step backwards, even as I acknowledge that some of these things were beyond my control. They weren't all beyond my control. I made a series of choices to push myself at an inhumane speed. 

And after everything that has happened, and the many things I have sacrificed, including my health and relationships, I know it is time to change course. It is time to move back in the direction I'd once been moving. I don't want to feel like I sold out to survival or anything else. Or worse: that I sold out for a cheap price. If I'm going to sell out, really, it had better come after a long heart-to-heart with myself about how much I'm worth.

So I will say this: In 2013 I am returning to intentional living. I don't care if it takes an email a day from a nun to remind me to write, or quitting my job, or moving across the country, or even finding an extended-period dog-sitter if needed. (If you'd like to volunteer, I'll start a list). In other words, this is not a new years resolution. There is no checklist. This year is about a return to a more contemplative way of being in the world. And whatever it takes for me to get there, I will do it. Because I can't hear myself otherwise. And when I can't hear myself, I get lost.

I look at all I have accomplished in my short life. I have already traveled through much of the world. I have already gotten a Ph.D. I am on my second career. I have achieved enough.

I want this year to instead be about going inward, knowing myself better, and doing whatever it is, whatever at all, is the scariest, bravest thing I could do to grow as a person, to be happier, to be me.

I have a couple of ideas of what that might look like... two in particular leap to mind immediately. They are probably good places to start.

And as long as I listen, I am confident that I will be ending 2013 from a different vantage than I did 2012 --whatever other tragedies, blessings or difficulties may await me in the year ahead.

I wish the same for you.

Namaste.