So how might I do this period of the year better, next time around? Not quite twelve months from now, the holidays will arrive again, and there will be a million things, because that is the way the world in which I live works. But there will also be the strong energetic pull to slow down, to slow down, to slow down, which is the way the world on which I live works, and that world is the far deeper, more profound of the two.
The tension between the two is the main stress of the holidays, and I don't want to live that way anymore. I want to experience the shift in seasons and the parts of our culture that dance around it (no matter how inelegantly, sometimes) as an experience of joy. It will be even more important next year, because there is the strongest chance that next year my holidays will look far different from how I've ever experienced them before.
I will not be juggling deadlines during this period next year. My writing and my work will be quite different then. Next year, as I enter the time when my body is really trying to slow down, I will make sure that there be nothing related to my work, literally nothing, that will demand my daily attention. I will have finished with that part of my year. I wish to meet those days next year in joyful immediacy, so that they enliven rather than drain me.
There will be social demands, and I will meet them. Some invites I will jump on. Others I will smilingly decline.
Gift-giving is a yearly stress for me. I butt up right against the deadline every year, for I have to this point lacked the easy imagination of the natural gift-giver. But 2018 will be different. With a little luck and a lot of hard work--hard work which has, I assure you, already begun--my relationship with abundance and thus my ability to give from center will radically change.
What you are reading here exists in resonance with the rest and rebirth of winter. It resonates with rest because it is a call to rest, a recognition of a failure of sorts at the end of 2017. It resonates with rebirth because I am describing a vision for a different me.
Here he comes.
How can I be so sure of his arrival? Because I look back twelve months ago and shake my head in marvel at all that's changed.
That change is only accelerating.