Resolutions You Can Live With

Last January I wrote a post about the “word” meme that swept across social media posts.  My word was infrastructure.  I succeeded in imposing some order upon my life.  But at the same time I became reacquainted the impermanence of everything. Life’s genie is a trickster and reminds us that all is perspective.

Framing

2014 served to reinforce my understanding of how important framing can be to successfully navigate life.  Culture is all in our heads but it is the single-most critical component of human existence.  We create everything from nothing.  All our contemporary life was created from ideas.  We work from beliefs, goals, and  knowledge.  Resolutions and choosing a word for the year are simply frameworks for constructing reality from dreams.
I employ whatever methods catch my fancy.  I assume that if I am attracted to an idea that it must somehow align with my past behavior and is attractive because of that familiarity.  That can be both good and bad;  people tend to repeat behaviors, even mediocre ones, not because they have been successful, but because they were not failures.  Only massive fails tend to stick in our minds as examples to avoid.  “That which does not kill us makes us stronger…” and possibly more mediocre.
I try to do a cursory examination of potential organizers I can adopt and see what ones best fit me and which ones I think might actually allow for actual improvement.  And I am just as likely to employ new ones as previously used ones.  I like change.
The usual sundry assortment of tools among which I will choose include social media memes, as per last year, and diverse tools from around the world such as this coming year being the Year of the Green Wooden Goat, as well as self-constructed programs that I will undoubtedly call upon.

Magical Thinking

This will be the first entire year without the living soul of Gabriel Garcia Marquez among us who remain here in this physically  bounded plane in which time flows linearly.  I think we should all keep the art of magical realism alive through the use of visualization in the next year.  Surreal logic might be as good as any other.  A world in which a ruling class of bankers fails and is rewarded for success makes as much sense as a Goddess who lives in a swamp and demands sacrifices from the people whose fertility and fields she controls.
I will continue to visualize a world in which women’s culture, and its concomitant prioritization of wanted and loved children’s health and education guides our actions.  Visualization works in that possibilities are most often thought of before they become real.  And perhaps, and perhaps not, surprisingly – imagining something and actually doing the action create the same brain responses.

Real World Expression

Thought is powerful, but so is action.  Doing, even if your heart is not in it, can do wonders.  Smile, walk, sing, and dance.  It is infectious, even within yourself.  Life is comprised of small actions.  History distills those small actions into patterns, but no history can be made from inaction.
Small efforts repeated become routine.  Repetition is also key to communication.  Without repetition we cannot tell signal from noise.    It might be a list, a schedule, or a menu, but patterns turn the noise of lives into action. I tend to go for themes.
If last year was for setting up and repairing neglected infrastructure, as it was for me, then the theme for this year is decorate.  This for me, is a year for building upon, for enhancement,  for celebrating what is already in place and right.  It is a year for adding texture and pattern to the frame for accomplishment I focused on last year.
So that is how I hope and plan to live this year.  I looked around all over the place for how others define wishes for the New Year.  Neil Gaiman’s words from his Journal resounded with rightness.

Be kind to yourself in the year ahead.

Remember to forgive yourself, and to forgive others. It’s too easy to be outraged these days, so much harder to change things, to reach out, to understand.

Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.

Meet new people and talk to them. Make new things and show them to people who might enjoy them.

Hug too much. Smile too much. And, when you can, love.

–– Neil Gaiman, 31 December 2014

 
How and what are you consciously creating of and in this current cycle?
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Note:  this post is part of a blog hop aka a group of networked bloggers writing about the same topics at about the same time.  Chloe is hosting this event:  http://chloeofthemountain.com/faith/its-all-in-your-perspective/