Month: January 2016

Word of the year 2016

In 2011 and 2012 I chose words of the year.  Then, in 2013, 2014, and 2015, I struggled to do so.  The struggle made me realize that I hadn’t chosen words in 2011 and 2012 so much as been chosen by words.  Trust and light just bubbled up in my consciousness, made themselves known as themes and priorities and metaphors.

This year that happened again.  My 2016 word of the year presented itself to me over and over in the last few weeks.

Ease.

I’ve written about ease before.  The word “ease” is part of a loving kindness meditation I have repeated to myself many, many times.  In June 2012 I wrote of ease:

That’s what I want.  Everything else I say I want can be folded into this single thing.  I want to live with ease.  To let the clouds of my emotions and reactions skid across the sky of my spirit without overly attaching to them.  To let the weights of sorrow and joy, which are part of my life in near-equal measure, slide off my shoulders rather than staggering under them.

And yes.  That’s what I want.  Everything I wrote then, three and a half years ago, resonates now, even more brightly, with the undeniable urgency of something I need to acknowledge, embrace, and own.  This is what I want.

I’ve mused many times on the invisible calculus that brings certain quotes and poems to mind at certain times.  It’s similar to the way I can’t forget the case of my oft-abandoned novel, the fact that my default tense in writing is present, the strange timing that causes me to look out the window at the moment of sunset more days than not.  All of these are glimpses of the vast design, as far as I’m concerned.  The subconscious mind brings things to us without us logically understanding how or why, but their importance cannot be denied.  I love these experiences, these ways that something beyond our comprehension glints through the fabric of our lives, this reminder that there’s something out there larger and more complex than we can possibly imagine.

I believe that is at work in my sensing of the word ease wherever I turn.  And ease is inextricably linked, for me, to another phrase that I think and write about often: let go.  It has to do with releasing my white knuckle grip on my own experience, with continuing to relinquish my attachment to how I thought it would be, with accepting the ways that my particular wiring and wide-open heart predisposes me to both heartache and joy.

So, with wide open eyes, arms, and hearts, and a deep wish for ease, here we go, into 2016.

Do you have a word?  What is it?

What I know

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Our family resolutions, on New Year’s Eve, with our up-much-later-than-usual tree visible in the background.

I’ve started the last few years writing about things I know, which is my version, I suppose of resolutions.  This year, Grace asked all of us to write down three resolutions on a paper star and hung all 12 of them from the chandelier in our dining room.  Over dinner, with our star-shaped resolutions spinning gently in the air above us, we talked about them.  Mine were pretty simple: Be here now, meditate 5 minutes every single day (I want to take a several-times-a-week habit and commit to it as a daily one in 2016), and stop snapping at my family.

In general, though, I don’t much go for making resolutions.  Rather, reflecting on what the year that’s closed has taught me feels like a good way to move forward into a new one.  So, with that in mind, I’ve been mulling for several weeks what I know now.  These dovetail, I find, with the resolutions I articulated when Grace asked me to.

I know that I need 8 hours of sleep.  I also know that I am prone to insomnia.  These two incontrovertible truths are often at odds with each other.

I know that the fastest way to gratitude and awareness of my blessings is paying attention to what’s right in front of me.

I know that I love most of all the three people I live with.  It is too easy to treat those who are closest to us poorly.  We trust them, and so we fall apart with them.  But this is backwards.  They deserve the best of us, not the worst.

I know that I happier when I move my body every day.  Yoga, walking, running, spinning; it can take lots of shapes.  But it helps me sleep, it helps me be present, it helps me inhabit my physical self and thus my own life.

I know that my intuition about people and situations – which I refer to as my Spidey Sense – is very rarely wrong.  I need to start trusting it more often.

I know that poetry is my lingua franca, the language my soul speaks.  I need to read it often.

What do you know?  What are your resolutions, if you make them?

How we pay attention

Most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now.

Acknowledging that this is the structure of the game we are playing allows us to play it differently.  How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

– Sam Harris

Thank you to Dina for drawing my attention to this beautiful quote, which I did not know before (italics hers, and mine too).