Nox Amicus

At 3:54pm on September 21st the Moon was New. I’m running behind schedule again this cycle, though I am still working through giving myself grace around things. As we said last cycle – “just be glad to be here.”

In the last post I talked about Priority, and how I was finally finding that I am worth being a Priority to myself, and “recognizing that the causes of anxiety that I had placed ahead of my well-being do not deserve the Priority I had unwillingly given them.” Saying this and owning it was huge for me – even more so is living that truth without fear. I had also said that “The people who love and care for you will understand or adapt, or not…”

That fear of abandonment is strong, but does being abandoned by people who can’t accept who you are, or where you are on your path, really count as abandonment?

As I have lived with the concept of being a Priority to myself, I have found that I have had to be stronger than I give myself credit for; or, really, ever had a desire to be. I never want to be forceful. I never want to rankle. I really just want to “be” – but it’s become obvious that is a thing we all still need to fight for.

This is where the focus for this cycle brings us: Fortitude, which can be defined as “courage in pain or adversity”. I think the first time I really started to explore this as a potential theme was in mid-August. I was out of the hospital about two weeks, and not quite back to work yet. I was on the phone with my sister and she was in awe of how I “handled” being in the hospital with all the tests and procedures. She called me brave.

I didn’t see that. I couldn’t. My humanity was on vacation while I was hospitalized – I was just one big science experiment. Keeping me alive was the successful result. I couldn’t attach an emotion to that – there was nothing I could do anyway. I had no control over the gallbladder and no control over the myriad infections my body was fighting. I wasn’t at war, I was simply the battlefield.

But looking back on it now, I didn’t lose it. I could have. I should have. But I held it together – I was involved and invested with my care team. I only got emotional a couple times, and only lost hope one day. So okay – maybe not bravery. But Fortitude? Yes.

Fortitude follows last cycle’s Priority well. It’s one thing to name myself and my needs as a Priority, it’s another to have the Fortitude to stand up for myself and claim it. There have been a number of tests over the past month – not intended as tests, not in any way malicious, but times when the “right choice for me” was not the choice someone else might have preferred. I find it’s tricky for people to get used to this change in me – times I would have caved and let my needs lapse in favor of keeping the peace. But someone else’s peace isn’t my battle to fight – particularly when I’m placed in the position of having to fight myself.

Fortitude was never a quality I would have ascribed to myself before – but I am working to develop it. To borrow a line from the companion song: “Think about direction; wonder why you haven’t before.”

At 2:07am on August 23rd, the Moon was New again. I am admittedly still working on getting any kind of a rhythm back, but I’m getting better – in many ways.

In the last post, I recognized the sense of Dualism I was living through. I described how my mind and my body at first felt disjointed, but eventually began to walk together on the path toward healing. That healing is ongoing, but the Impatience and Dualism have given way to appreciation.

I am still in a frame of mind where I reflect on those weeks in the hospital. The moments of joy and the moments of despair turned into a soup of existence. Everything distilled over time into its essence. There was a weird kind of freedom in that soup. I began to look at life through a very different lens.

With very few exceptions, my life has been spent playing a role – most often that of mediator or peacekeeper — but regardless of the role, there was outsized responsibility that really didn’t belong with me. The effort to live up to those responsibilities drives most of my anxiety, which then exacerbates a lack of confidence. It’s an exhausting cycle.

But something remarkable happened in the hospital. I recognized that I was off-stage. There was no role to play. In my last post I said that I knew “I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole”. The only responsibility I had was to be there. This clarity was more than conceptual – it was physical.

I know what I want to hear when I play keyboards. I know that 90% of the time I can play parts exactly the way I want to. But that other 10% is when the pressure is on – and the yips happen. If I screw up, I’m going to let down people I care about. I will be bad, wrong, and ultimately unlovable.

But in the hospital I could feel what it was like to live without the yips. I felt what it was like to trust myself. More than that, to believe in myself. I looked around at all of those people who were taking care of me, who were healing me, and who were simply caring for me – and I felt like I had an intrinsic value all my own. I was worthy of being a Priority.

In those moments, all of the other fabricated Priorities began to melt away. Not that things outside myself became unimportant, but their position was usurped by something inherently present – my self. I could be a Priority without guilt or shame. I still need to uphold my obligations and be impeccable with my word, but I should never fear taking my own needs and wants into consideration. I used to feel I had to negotiate (or brute force) what I felt was best for me. No, just make the decision. It can be that simple. The people who love and care for you will understand or adapt, or not – in which case, where is their level of capacity for understanding? This does not take negotiation off the table, but it does remove fear and anxiety from the equation.

So the focus for this cycle is Priority. Recognizing that I am worth being a Priority to myself, and recognizing that the causes of anxiety that I had placed ahead of my well-being do not deserve the Priority I had unwillingly given them. The lyric from the companion song says it all, wrapped in the reality of my summer: “Don’t think about all those things you fear, just be glad to be here.”

At 12:11pm on July 24th, the Moon was New again. While I realize this is probably the latest in a cycle I’ve posted an intention, I have lived with this since before the Moon was New.

In the last cycle I had been focused on Waiting, realizing that I had a propensity to wait for some kind of inspired alignment before taking action on things; I acknowledged that it’s always time and I’m always here, and in doing so I realized that sometimes we can just act out of instinct rather than “waiting for a moment that just don’t come”.

The song from last cycle, “It’s All I Can Do” by The Cars, contains the chorus “It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you.” That became the mantra for the cycle. It became less philosophical and much more practical, and in those moments, the concept of Dualism for this cycle was born.

I have always tried to keep these posts universal – referring to events or people in my life in the abstract, because it was thoughts and feelings I’d been trying to comment on and learn from. But I cannot ignore the fact that I spent most of July in a hospital bed recovering from complications from gallbladder surgery.

Until July 8, the most complicated medical procedures I’d had were dental implants. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an IV drip, never had surgery – none of it. But when they put me on the bed in the emergency room, I knew this was a different game – one I had no control over. I realized then that I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole – but I wasn’t there.

In the mid-1600s, René Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy where he described one aspect of Dualism as the mind being distinct from the body. I felt this during those days in the hospital. I was conscious – though addled with fever – and aware of everything, but this was very separate from my physical self that I simply couldn’t relate to. It was going through things that my rational brain could understand, but not comprehend.

The line was decidedly clear one particularly hard day – I was kinda done. My body was tired, my mind was exhausted, I just didn’t know how much I had left in me. But I dug deep and gave my body a pep talk – I told it how proud I was of the way it was persevering, I told it that if we just kept going there really was an other side, and I told it I loved him. This was not dissimilar from comforting an inner child. My body stopped crying and grieving and began to calm, and we pushed on side by side. Not integrated, but together.

So the focus for the July new moon has been Dualism. By the time the New Moon arrived, I was already two thirds of the way through the hospital stay – I had been living through June’s cycle of impatience, but I had already recognized the Dualism I was living. Impatience was giving way to grace and cooperation – and that’s just a gentler way to move through life.

Lyrically, I can feel the shift too – this cycle’s song is again sung to myself, but instead of concentrating on the separation of mind and body, it celebrates their partnership.

“We’re on our way home.”

At 6:32am on June 25th, the Moon was New again. While I may be posting this a few days after the fact, the theme has been on my mind for well over a week now.

The focus for the last cycle was Joy—and in that post, I contrasted my desire for joy with my persistent sense of anxiety. Through the course of the month, I recognized that while my perception of this is uniquely my own, the conceptual challenges are not. If there was a plot to a movie contrasting Joy and anxiety, there must be a lot of people this touches.

What is unique, though, are the circumstances that keep me sitting in this space.

This came into focus for me during last week’s heatwave. I was trying to balance humidity, temperature, and air pressure in an elegant dance of airflow to keep the space cool. I failed — miserably. I was so desperate for a solution that I began brute-forcing every metric: fans on high, cooling on maximum. But it was having the opposite effect. When I stepped back and really watched what I had wrought, I saw the problem. The heat was subtle and stealthy, but I was unleashing chaos to remediate it.

It wasn’t until I stopped that I noticed that one fan wasn’t doing what I needed at all. I moved it two feet, set the speed to low, and suddenly everything clicked.

Slow down. Don’t overthink the problem. Nudge the subtle changes first. Be patient.

Patience is a funny thing — like airflow, it’s subtle. Where are the timey-wimey lines between wasting time, lying in wait, patiently waiting, and evolving?

None of us want to waste time. Not many want to be Aaron Burr. And patience, unchecked, can drift into inertia. But waiting for the right moment and leaning into it — not with the reflexivity of lying in wait, but with the effortless flow of evolving — that’s where growth happens.

Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly realized that I have been Waiting for much of my life. That recognition brought the theme for this cycle.

I realized that I would save things, I would delay things, I would inhibit things because “it wasn’t time yet.” It was the pack-rat trap of saying “I may need this someday,” only to realize someday is today and I really don’t need that.

The same is true for meeting a moment. In the last post, I reflected on Australia six years ago, and right now I am eight years removed from the trip to Greece. Those moments arrived and I was ready for them. But have I always been ready for all the moments and never gave myself permission to see it?

There’s a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” that’s always haunted me:

You spend your life waiting / for a moment that just don’t come

I always felt like I was waiting on the moment — as if it were the moment’s responsibility to come to me.

But I always glossed over the next line:

Well, don’t waste your time waiting.

A week or so ago, I was meditating, and a phrase came into my mind that struck like lightning: “Here is now”.

It reframed everything. I didn’t need to keep saving things for some future “someday.” It reframed the meeting of the moments of Greece and Sydney, my fraught relationship with time, and the tentative nature of my steps along the path of self-advocacy. It’s always been time. I have always been here.

So this cycle, I want to look closely at my relationship with Waiting. What moments have I delayed out of fear or anxiety? Which have I correctly deferred because I wasn’t quite evolved enough to make them successful? Some bits of evolution are too convoluted to just throw caution to the wind — but maybe I’m more ready for some things than I give myself credit for.

The companion song is again one I’m singing to myself — not in anger or regret, but in compassion. And maybe just a little impatience.

It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you

At 11:02pm on May 26th, the Moon was New again. Leading up to that moon, I was convinced what the theme was going to be! I prepared for it; I researched it – but a moment from a few days before was stuck in my brain and wouldn’t dislodge.

In the last post on Apologies, I spoke about the origins of the word Sorry being from the base of the noun “sore.” Its synonyms in this case include ‘pained’ and ‘distressed.’ On reflection, this brought me back to a diagnosis from a psychologist 20 years ago – sure, I had generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders – but I also had what amounted to dysphoria. This was explained as the antonym of euphoria; I am predisposed to see the glass as half-empty. Whether this is neurochemical or conditioned as a result of trauma, we don’t know – and honestly, I don’t know how much it matters.

I have done a lot of work in twenty years to see the brighter side, to not get mired in the everything – but sometimes that amounts to nothing more than masking, where I don’t believe it, but I am in “fake it ’til you make it” mode. This is especially true in times where I am particularly stressed – times when I need to be “on” and reliable. It’s times like this that the anxiety simply takes over.

The trigger question that flipped the script on the focus for this post was an honest query related to a potential birthday gift: “What would make you happy?”

Back in November, I wrote a post on Definition, wondering how I define myself. In that post I spoke about the movie “Inside Out 2” and how the primary conflict in the movie was between Joy and Anxiety. As I had been recounting the movie at the time, a most trusted soul asked where my brain escaped to during the moments where Anxiety is in control, and I related that it was in Sydney. In that post in November, I said, “There was a completeness in Sydney where there were no contingencies or expectations – I was free to walk the streets with no agenda at all – as myself, not a customized version of me created for someone else.” It is in these moments that I find Joy.

I went through a period of time in my life where I would not use the word Happy when referencing myself. I believed it was bad luck – or some twisted kind of nirvana – where the moment you say you’re there, you get kicked out. Happy was anathema to me. I’m working on softening that stance – but for the sake of honoring that discomfort, the theme for this cycle is Joy.

This past weekend I watched the season finale of Doctor Who. While the Doctor was expressing fear about an upcoming event, one of their prior incarnations advised: “Don’t go in fear, go with that lovely smile”. This preceded the Doctor being comforted by a character from the last Christmas special – Joy.

We change, we grow, and we become. Through all of the lives we live and faces we put on, we are still and always us. But those subsequent iterations are informed by the spirit with which we enter them. The day is just the day – it can be anything. But if we can find a way, any way, to approach it with Joy instead of with anxiety, it simply makes for a better day for everyone!

I should have been riddled with anxiety when I went to Sydney – but I wasn’t, at all. I embraced it and lived it, and found great Joy in all of it. I know that feeling, I am capable of that feeling, and I believe that I don’t have to fly halfway around the world to recapture it.

There was a song that was the impetus for that trip, “The Door Into Summer” by the Monkees. On that trip I actually had a chance to tell Mike Nesmith (who sang it) that the second verse is what brought me all that way to meet him. Today, as we are looking at the threshold of another summer in a few weeks, I want to reflect on the Joy found in that trip, and do my best to greet each day welcoming whatever Joys, large or small, can be presented. Anxiety can rest, Joy can breathe in the day.

At 3:11pm on Sunday, April 27th, the Moon was new again. I’ve been ready for this one — the idea for the focus came right on the heels of the last cycle’s post. In that last post, I focused on Apologies, and drawing on lessons garnered from an earlier post on Mattering, I came to the realization that at least part of my reflexive need to apologize was rooted in a deep absence of self-worth.

That feeling is pervasive throughout my life. There are many times when I just don’t feel deserving to be in any particular situation. It seems that regardless of how much verbal affirmation I may get, part of me still thinks that people feel some sense of obligation to make me feel accepted, welcomed, or valued. It isn’t genuine — it’s what they’re “supposed to” do. If I trace that back, I can see that is how I felt growing up as well. When I was young, I always felt that I was in the way, that I was an inconvenience. The certainty I felt in my perceptions meant that any affirmations to the contrary appeared more an act of service or social correctness than genuine sincerity.

Because of this, I’ve never done a very good job of advocating for myself. If you inherently feel you don’t matter, there’s nothing to advocate for. Instead, I took the position that I was lucky to have anything, and that asking for more was either greedy or simply inappropriate.

There have been a few times that I’ve deviated from that. There was a time I petitioned to rejoin a band, which led to another 10 years of making great music together. When I experienced an abrupt and unscheduled career change and was asked what my new salary requirements were, I did my best to state my worth. Both of these times, self-advocacy did indeed get me closer to where I wanted to be, but these are exceptions to the rule. Far too often, I’ve muddled through circumstances or stayed in situations long after they had lost their ability to serve me.

But I was lucky to have anything. So just because something didn’t make me happy didn’t feel like reason enough to leave.

Combining a diminished sense of self-worth with a paralyzing fear of abandonment is never good.

So this cycle, I want to focus on Goodbye. There’s a lot of melancholy around this — I’ve done a lot of work over the years to get closer to this point. Many of the truly expendable elements of my life have already been phased out. Everything that’s left is better than I have ever allowed myself — still, happiness is elusive. I want to be clear that just because I am focusing on Goodbye doesn’t automatically mean I intend to say it in any facet of my life. More so, I am allowing myself the freedom to examine my life’s interactions and circumstances and ask myself a basic question: Does this serve me? If it does, then let’s devote more energy to it. If it doesn’t, then I give myself permission to consider Goodbye.

It’s a tough pivot to make — to spend so much time meek and paralyzed, casting my fates to luck or whim instead of definitive direction — but it’s a change whose time has come.

“I was never much good at Goodbye” — but it’s time to embrace the possibilities.

At 6:58am on Saturday morning, the Moon was New again. This may be one of the soonest times I’ve posted after a New Moon – but something occurred to me a few days ago that is creating a pretty deep dive.

The past couple of posts have been focused on community – both Fraternity and Support were outwardly focused. It was during the Crossroads post on November 14th that I had said, “I have the privilege of directing my energies outwards rather than just focusing on myself”. But this week, a long-standing bit of self-identification ran into an introspective moment of “but why”. I didn’t like the answer.

For as long as I can remember, the phrase “I’m sorry” has been reflexive. I guess I always knew why, but never bothered to really dig into it. It has gotten so prevalent that it’s even a nickname my sister has for me. One of the most profound moments that I can really remember saying I’m sorry” was in high school. I don’t remember the circumstance, but it was in the cafeteria and I was addressing a table of seniors when I was a sophomore.

I don’t know that I was apologizing for anything specifically though. I think it was one of those reflexive moments. But why? Yes – how many decades later am I stopping to ask that question?

A few nights ago, I was journaling and realized that I have two different circumstances when I say “I’m sorry“. The first is when it’s part of a conversation. Those times when I say that I’m sorry, it is accompanied by an explanation of the thing that I’m sorry for, and most often why I’m sorry for the incident. The other times, the reflexive times, are actually an emotional resignation. It is accompanied by my emotionally disengaging from the subject, and cocooning within myself. It is a flag of surrender. Something designed to stop the onslaught of trauma.

It is interesting that the word “sorry” has roots of West Germanic origin, from the base of the noun “sore”. Its synonyms in this case include ‘pained’ and ‘distressed’.

In September, I wrote about ‘Mattering’, and I said “…I haven’t felt like I Mattered. I existed, I was a resource, I was convenient, I was a distraction – but the concept of my essence actually Mattering was a rarity.” As I looked at the concept of emotional resignation and cocooning, this concept of not mattering became even more pronounced.

For years, I have tried to stay mindful of The Four Agreements (from the book of the same name by Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills). The first agreement is to “Be Impeccable with Your Word”.
My reflexive Apologies are self-diminishing by design, but am I diluting the sincerity of actual Apology through overuse?

In his book The Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant wrote “A man who has committed an injustice owes a debt to the one he has wronged; the repayment of this debt consists not in a material indemnification but in a sincere confession of his injustice, and in the resolve not to repeat it.” My reflexive use of “I’m sorry” is self-serving, and never offered in service of someone who’s been injured. It’s a way for me to escape a situation part of me perceives as dangerous. This flies in the face of the second of the Four Agreements which states “Don’t Take Things Personally”. It is not wrong to be mindful of my feelings and reactions, but it is not correct to lessen the value of a genuine Apology by using the same language as a selfish escape hatch.

So the focus for this cycle is Apology. My goal is to be mindful of when and why I am moved to say “I’m sorry”, and reserve it for moments of atonement or sympathy. When I find I am moved to use it by reflex, I want to have the presence of mind to stop and examine what in that moment has caused me to feel threatened. And if there is some kind of limbic response, do I need to react to it out loud? Or, to reference a quote attributed to Craig Ferguson – “Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me now?”

At 7:45pm on February 27th, the Moon was New again. I am posting this closer to the Full Moon than the New Moon this cycle – but I am hopeful to be able to set an intention and draw down the energies needed to manifest it.

During this past cycle, my focus was on Fraternity. I juxtaposed my own feelings around needing to keep the peace and avoid conflict with a need to be fiercely protective and nurturing. How can you peacefully fight a war?

This is all brought about by the current climate that is seeing the implosion of a world I had grown up feeling was indestructible. We were always led to believe the existential threat would come from the outside, not the inside. But that presupposed honor and integrity – the erosion of which has been accelerating for over 40 years now.

These days I am reminded of my father, who, after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, said something akin to ‘this isn’t a world I want to live in anymore’. I want to stress that what I am about to say is not any kind of ideation – but I think I get where he was coming from. We come to understand that while there are hiccups and bumps in the road, there will always be progress, there will always be evolution of the human condition. Today, I am seeing tragic regression.

I am not okay.

Nevertheless – I am a cisgender white male of Western European descent, passable as “normal’ by all appearances. I am not seen as part of an at-risk population – whether that population is the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, people with chronic medical issues, or Federal workers. I need to be an ally. I need to stand up for my chosen family. If I don’t stand, then I am complicit in the persistent attacks on them.

But I am depleted.

Nevertheless – I need to stand. So the focus for this cycle is Support.

Support has to be mutual now. It can’t be carrying, it can’t be service – at least not all the time. This is a marathon, not a sprint. It also can’t be theoretical. In the last cycle I posited that we embrace the sense of community from the ground up and lead each moment and each interaction with compassion. Still very valid strategies – when we have the energy.

Shortly after the Moon was New, I felt the need to be Supportive in real time – and in my presence I saw Support in one of the simplest shelters, the lean-to. We lean into one another, receiving support while simultaneously giving it. There may not be much forward momentum, but there is survival.

I was discussing this with a trusted soul this past week, and they referred me to a 2008 scientific paper entitled “Social Support and the Perception of Geographical Slant” (available by searching the title, the article is currently available on the National Library of Medicine website). The abstract prefaces the heart of the work in this sentence: “Participants accompanied by a friend estimated a hill to be less steep when compared to participants who were alone.”

If we extend this, when seen through the lens of sympathetic or empathetic community, maybe our struggles are not as insurmountable as they appear in the dark of night.

The song for this cycle extends the concept of leaning into one another. I am buoyed by this line in particular:

But if we are wise

We know that there’s always tomorrow

May we sustain one another into our tomorrows!

The last new moon was at 7:36am on January 29th. We are almost halfway through this cycle, and until last night I hadn’t felt as though I was any closer to having words – much less having focus.

I am grateful for that sentiment changing yesterday. It was a trying day where I felt I had to lay the groundwork to say goodbye to someone I had once been very close to. Goodbyes of this type are rarely easy – but sometimes we need to do difficult things for our overall health – and to align with our deepest held values.

In last cycle’s focus, I closed the writing by saying that we need to “Cast off that which burdens us, or no longer serves us, and unfurl the sails. Breathe the air, feel the salt spray, and set a course for the horizon.” The freedom and tranquility of the open sea calls loudly these days, and there is so much that is spiritually burdensome. I am reminded of something a dear, trusted soul told me twelve years ago – “make room in your life for joy.”. Joy has been an infrequent companion these past few weeks.

As a spiritual mentor keeps echoing to me – we cannot help the way we feel, but we do have control over how we choose to react. I can either become catatonic and surrender to my terrors, or I can lash out in omnidirectional anger and frustration, or I can choose a gentler path.

My own mental chemistry cajoles me into assuming responsibility for making everything okay. Don’t let there be unpleasant ripples in the lives around you, keep the peace and avoid conflict. Of course, this becomes completely undone when one of my other triggers is set off. If someone acts in a way reminiscent of one or more antagonistic characters in the story of my life – this persona of peaceful arbiter of neutrality morphs into selfish self-preservation. I don’t particularly like either side of that coin. I would prefer to blend personal agency with an open generosity of spirit.

This brings me to the focus for this cycle: Fraternity. No – not the Greek campus organizations, but the second definition: “the state or feeling of friendship and mutual support within a group” – helping one another. I had a moment last month when I was volunteering at the door of an event, acting as a gatekeeper to keep the event safe. This evoked a feeling of being protective and nurturing toward a community that needed those things in that moment. This is who and what I want to be, and this is who I hope we all might aspire to being.

The motto of the French Republic, enshrined in their constitution, is Liberté, égalité, fraternité – or liberty, equality, and fraternity. I always believed these ideals were common to my country as well – but I’m not sensing that these days, and that makes me sad. I find I am angry because I am mourning the loss of something I had grown up feeling couldn’t be compromised – and it’s being lost as a result of a long-game of deceptive glamour. Pretend to give the people what they want, and you can charge anything for it – including their very freedom.

But what if we flip the script and think globally and act locally? What if we all were the gatekeepers of those around us who are less fortunate? What if we embrace the sense of community from the ground up? What if we disregard the noise and lead each moment and each interaction with compassion? Can we make kindness and compassion contagious?

So this cycle I will work to embrace the concept of Fraternity – of working for the common good. I will try to set aside the weapons of war for the tools of peace. I will endeavor to understand, and where relevant educate, rather than dismiss. Much like I did in the ‘goodbye’ I mentioned earlier, I left open an avenue for compromise. There are very few people who are not eligible for a redemption arc.

The bridge for this cycle’s song has to be my mantra:

If I’m laden at all
I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart
Isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another

At least in the microcosm, I want to try to greet the world with love and compassion and support. I felt no burden gatekeeping the event – I was proud to carry my brothers and sisters. It wasn’t a sacrifice, it was a privilege. We don’t lose anything when we give to an honorable cause.

The Moon was New again at 5:27pm on December 30. The last New Moon of 2024, and now we begin a new year – not quite with a clean slate, but at least with opportunity.

The last focus was Hills – where I explained how one of the elements of my personality I am most fond of is my penchant for wandering off to climb a hill to see what’s there. I closed the last post with a quote from the companion song – “I’ve got my hands and my head full – A cautious step but I’m hopeful. I leave the station I go up into the Hills”

I am still very much working on finding my self; understanding what inspires and motivates me. I was blessed enough to travel to London with my sister a few weeks ago, and while I was away, I tried to find moments to sit with my thoughts in a comfortably unfamiliar environment.

The only thing that really came to me was the urgency of staying in motion. I savor quiet hours at home without interruption – but I realized that during those hours I am not chasing the dopamine hit from movies, books, or video; I am more often bouncing from project to project, trying to make order from the chaos that is usually the state of my life. Being away from it all, I came to realize just how much is on my plate. I am known to say, “It’s all good stuff,” and it is – but where are the priorities? What’s there because it really serves me, and what’s there because it’s either assumed or expected?

A life spent in service can be a beautiful thing – but even those who serve need to be motivated by what serves them. Trudging through the days simply “doing the needful” (thanks to my South Asian friends for that turn of phrase), working for some elusive goal without the requisite satisfaction from the moments spent, is not enough. It should never be enough. There are too many stories scattered in my history of people who worked to fulfill some dream of retirement, only to not be able to live that dream.

I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago when a friend passed away suddenly, having just recently wound down their workload in anticipation of retirement. Life is too short, no matter what your age or condition. I wish I could go back to my fifteen-year-old self. Or my eight-year-old self. Or any stop along the way from there to here. Live with integrity, live with compassion, live with gratitude and kindness – but also live for your own dreams and desires in each moment. Not for someday – but for right now.

So the focus for this cycle is Movement. More specifically, the simplicity of Movement. It isn’t difficult to live – it’s challenging to live well. Cast off that which burdens us, or no longer serves us, and unfurl the sails. Breathe the air, feel the salt spray, and set a course for the horizon. It’s just another Hill after all.