This is the time of year when so many people commit to a word for the next year and/or a set of goals to accomplish in the various facets of their lives.
I'm here to extol the virtues of not doing this, of leaving oneself open to whatever life has in store and dancing with that...instead of having a finely-honed plan of how one thinks things should work out and what one should accomplish. Should is the operative word, but you could easily use want or hope to here instead...or any other word that implies that we have control over life, when we all know that's just not the case.
I've lived without goals for the last two years, and I'm a much better person for it.
Had I gone into 2012 with a laundry list of things I hoped to accomplish as an art quilter, which is what I was up to creatively at that time, I wouldn't have found my way to mixed media, art journaling, book arts, painting. I also shaped the circumstances to greatly reduce the stress in my life by removing the ambition, the competition, the need to constantly fire myself up to create more-better-different.
The same goes for having a special word for the year. I'd had enough years where I'd selected a word at the outset, only to quickly forget that word, then remember it somewhere middle of February and berate myself for forgetting or not doing all I could do to BE that word for the year.
Better to strive to become a person with more inherent value...as in more serene, intrinsically happier, more content, mellower, more peaceful, able to live in the now. More confident that every day I am in the right place, doing the right thing, becoming more mySelf all the time. And knowing that this is what life is really about ~ not how well I stick to an adopted word for the year or how many widgets I create or how many shows I have or how much of my work sells.
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