Burning the Old Year
“So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
”¦
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn‘t do
crackle after the blazing dies.”
-Naomi Shihab Nye, excerpted from Burning the Old Year
As I look back over last year, I have much to be grateful for and few things that are crackling after the blaze of the New Year. I had three important priorities that I successfully worked on: (1) my relationship with my daughter; (2) international travel; and (3) writing a book
I was able to combine two of these priorities when I traveled to Vietnam with my daughter last summer. We spent a week volunteering at a bilingual school in Hanoi teaching English and two weeks traveling around other parts of the country. Soon after, my daughter started
college in August and we have probably had more frequent and longer conversations than we did when she was home. Our relationship has become even stronger and closer, we‘ve learned more about each other (and ourselves) and, during the school breaks when she has been home, we‘ve spent true quality, loving time with each other. In terms of writing a book, it has been a difficult but transformative process and a journey in itself but I now have a rough draft of about 200 pages.
I‘d love to be able to say that I simply “put my mind to it” and brought these priorities to fruition. The truth is that I had a lot of support in the form of: help from friends, working with a therapist, and working with a writing coach.
Are you hearing any loud crackles from things you didn‘t get done last year? Do you need to get the blaze started on priorities you want to work on in 2015? If so, I‘m happy to offer a 10% discount on all my coaching services through mid-February.