As is perhaps obvious from my previous post about picking the “right” perfume to wear for New Year’s Eve, I’m a sucker for creating a Sense of Occasion for pretty much any event. So, of course, I love making new year’s resolutions, though I don’t take them as seriously as I did in my teens and early twenties. This year, however, I decided to try a slightly different approach, inspired by a few other blog and Facebook posts I’d read, and declared for myself a Word of the Year instead. After I bit of meditation and contemplation, I settled on BUILD.
Actually, I came up with REBUILD first. But, energetically, that felt a bit more shadowy. Not quite negative, exactly; just touched with loss in a way that I wasn’t comfortable with inviting in to set the tone for the full twelve months ahead. (I plan on still working with REBUILD to be honest, just from a more Jungian Shadow perspective, as a necessary yin to the yang of BUILD.)
As for BUILD, though, I intend to use it to remind myself not to run away from a thing after I’ve enjoyed the excitement of the Beginning of it.
I am endlessly capable of being seduced by Beginnings; it’s seeing things through their long, indefinable Middles that I am less good at. Someone once described my defining character trait as my sense of curiosity, which was one of the most accurate (and lovely) things that has ever been said about me. I never want to find myself in a place where I’m not fascinated by the world around me. However, I can often allow that curiosity to serve as justification for half-assing my way through the completion of a goal or project because I want to get to the next shiny thing that’s caught my eye. To be sure, in an effort to get to an Ending, I can grit my teeth and barrel through pretty much anything. But after a lifetime of wishing myself to 5 o’clock, or Friday, or the end of the season, or the end of the year, I’m hoping to finally slow down a bit and learn to actually enjoy the Middle of any given experience.
Focusing on Middles is also an attempt to step away from the precocious child routine that has been secretly running my life, like a bad Wes Anderson script, for as long as I can remember. My inner eight year old still wants to be immediately good at a thing, or not do it at all. As I watch so many of my peers beginning to find tangible success in their chosen fields—success that has come through sticking with an idea or goal—I find myself kind of inwardly pouting over my own perceived stasis or lack of achievement. Achievement being a euphemism for recognition here, of course.
I’ve always been enamored of the spotlight, and applause is usually more of a motivator for me than the simple inner satisfaction of a job well done. But of course applause doesn’t come in the middle of a thing, which, I’m sure, has contributed to my attempts to avoid all those slow, quiet spots between the beginning and the end. I wouldn’t need to remind myself to focus on BUILDING for a full year if applause didn’t matter to me.
But, luckily, I’m starting to see that the secret power of BUILD is in the way it serves as a reminder that I have so many good things in my life right now. BUILD does not equal CREATE. I’m grateful for the solid foundation I’ve made for myself in so many crucial areas of my life. Surely the best way to honor the work that I’ve done so far is to not allow those good Beginnings to atrophy into lackluster Endings simply because I’ve abandoned them as good enough. I’d like to work with the energy of 2014 as a gateway into the middle of my grand adventures, as I begin to BUILD my beginnings into something so much richer than I ever could have imagined from the starting line.
Queen of Peaches 