A Look Below

Qu'appelle Valley, 2012

Substitutions for last year’s resolutions can be two fold. One: renewing a resolution made the previous January with just a bit of tweaking to see if this new year could be better. More motivation, not as much work/life imbalance… or any reason I need to not continue forward. The second part of substitutions for last year’s resolutions are to play word games! Change resolution to commitment. That should work. Actually, I’ve tried both solutions and neither work very well. Work/life balance ~ now retirement/life balance ~ just keeps tipping over! As far as the word games, I get so caught up in the game, I forget why I started playing them!

New Year’s resolutions have never been my strong suit. Making them has been easy ~ more like a wish list without a plan. Following through on any resolutions is another story completely. In January, 2019, I learned about the concept of ‘going deeper not wider’ from Winnipeg writer David Cain. An interview with Mary Hynes on CBC radio and David's blog at https://www.raptitude.com, suggested a change in perspective for his readers. Using the theory ‘going deeper not wider’ I have found an anchor. I no longer make New Year’s resolutions (i.e. commitments) in a wish list kind of way. Instead, decisions from previous year’s commitments are reviewed. Do I still want to go forward with any one of them, do a bit of the infamous tweaking, or continue to move forward? I have learned to follow through on the projects I have chosen. Some of them have been completed ~ like painting my closet. Some are ongoing ~ like clearing the clutter of years of moving. The most important is writing. Not just this blog, but another project that I took on over a year ago. And then there was the issue of retirement. When I first learned of a Depth Year, retirement was close and really needed my attention. This was one of my early projects that threatened to overwhelm and derail me.

Retirement has suggested, at least to me, stopping. Stopping has seldom been an option, so I decided last year to look more deeply into what retirement means for me, my relationship to life and all it has to offer. There is still much to do, but with the concept of ‘deeper not wider’, that most unpleasant feeling of being overwhelmed was placed as an issue for review using this new perspective. As a result, I've been learning how to take tippy toes into this new life in small steps, cheering myself on and listening to the wisdom of friends and family.

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls, must dive below.”

~ John Dryden, All for Love