A dramatic year...
One that stank for the world, of course: major moves into aggressive idiocy. But it's not very interesting to talk about Brexit and the UK, Trump and America. Or about dead celebrities – some good people are gone, yes, but that happens always. And many of them were old enough that grieving doesn't seem all that necessary – just a sort of 'vale': that was a good life, thanks for what you did with it.
My year was unavoidably influenced by all that, but its essential nature was different: from sick and sleepy for ten months, to better, to much better. With, as I've said, a new ruthlessness: if illness and death have reminded me that they're always close by, life has sharper and more definite edges – the university, the Jung-Institut, at least two governments, and other large and semi-inept organisations will just have to accept as much energy and attention as I bother to give them, and not whine and ask for more.
Which is just fine: the greatly increased clarity that has clicked into place comes from my analysis with B. more than anything – a direct connection to dustier, more broken parts of myself across the winter of 2015-16 seems to have gradually given back a lot of energy; it has also clarified what I can hope for, what has fallen into time, and what can at least be remembered and enjoyed in memory.
But I do feel relatively healthy: even the weakness of my legs, which has been basically mechanical rather than caused by illness (surprise! if you sleep a lot for ten months your muscles fade) has itself been shifting – not because I'm disciplined enough to actually exercise, but just because I am walking around and doing things again.
Any plans for the next year don't seem quite like resolutions: they're just what I want – though they resemble standard resolutions: get some weight off, write a lot. Finish the Jung-Institut degree.
And ignore, or at least respond only minimally to, the restrictions and demands of the chaotic world....
But best of all of this is certainly that larger context where it all seems to happen, now: a broader awareness of how everything in me, and in past and present and in the world, shifts and balances across time, across levels of consciousness and being.
Because that makes all change, and any apparent stasis, interesting....
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