This past year has been particularly good to me; I’m hoping that my luck holds for awhile. 

I dislike New Year’s as an Enforced Fun kind of holiday, but I love how people all of a sudden reevaluate their lives. People dump their partners, start regimens, people leave town, quit their jobs, resolve that the future will be different. We’re boldly moving forward, right now. I like the dramatic rise in expectations. I think it’s funny how people expect change to happen all at once, all of a sudden, in one fell swoop. How you can declare that change has already happened, without taking the time to make things different, which of course takes a lot longer than it does to make a statement or adopt some rhetoric. What does it take to live the life you want? A flood of action which leaves purposes way behind it! If you use the right language, it’s real. I used to work with someone who deliberately embraced this idea, and was convinced that if you spoke as if something were true, then it would really happen. This is either brilliant or psychotic, and I’m still not entirely sure which. 

I think it’s fascinating how talking about and around change is more seductive than making it happen. Because most things change at a glacier pace; you can work towards things, but only at the speed of dripping cold molasses. And you usually can only sort of approach change, not actually get there, like a horizon line or a mathematical limit. And we’re not used to things operating at that kind of pace.

It’s why I like learning how to do things the slow way, learning how to dig in. It’s good to learn more about how to have patience, in case you might need it.