(New Year wishes tradition.
2017,
2016,
2015 here).
This year
Give something you don't want to, a chance. Something your life plans, timelines, older self and schedule, violently revolts against. Give it a chance, slow dance with it and then in whispers invite this adventure home. It might be a slight detour and a story for the grandkids or the best road you hadn't planned on taking.
This year
I hope you find magic in the middles. We're all seduced constantly by that hope, drug and power of the new and the throat-catching comfort of closure and endings. Between these two adrenalin laced extremes lie most of our lives. So treat the middles- of that job you've been in a few years, that relationship starting to look too familiar, books, lives and your own bodies with softness, wonder and awe.
There's movie-like sex appeal there too.
This year,
Find your words. They're your strongest currency and most likely to zip and unzip your life in ways you don't yet know. Speak up, sing a song for someone, write an awkward letter, trace out a meme you relate to, but find your words, hold them in your hand and set them free into the world. You'll set yourself free unknowingly, too.
This year,
Learn something new. Your neighbour's name and the unfamiliar way they take their tea. A language your nana left inside the folds of your name. The way constellations look when they move and bend. How to write a haiku. Learn something out of the syllabus of your Grand Life Plans and you'll discover new worlds and ways to start conversations at awkward parties and mixers.
This year,
like every year: love softly, love long, love too much and too often, love louder than the cynical voices in your own head or inside texts on your phone, love hard and on purpose, love irrevocably, love permanently even though better judgment and time tries to tell you otherwise. Love yourself and others into ridiculous, beautiful, cartoon shapes, so that at the end of this year no one looks the same.
And if for scheduling or life reasons you feel you just can't- find an animal to feed and pet once a day. It may end up feeling the same.
Happy New Year.
(A sunset on Radhanagar beach, with my oldest friend. One of my favourite memories of 2017)
