It’s one week into the New Year and I’m feeling damn inspired; the most since my autumn crack-up, maybe even the most I’ve felt in any New Year. Thankfully, this time the inspiration has been chummed up with a rather healthy bellyful of willpower. Something I’m normally frustratingly unfamiliar with – I’m typically an enthusiastic starter of things, but rarely make the first bend, let alone finish. Not sure why, but who cares – this year willpower is upon me and I must say I’m rather enjoying the company.
As proof, I have achieved – in one week, remember – the following…entered in a half-marathon (and excreted 16km of sweat all over Oxford), plonked down some loot for Spanish lessons and enrolled in a yoga class. Of course I am currently unemployed, and thus unencumbered by responsibility, so have a little more time on my hands than most. Still, I’m quite proud.
Anyway, enough beating around the bush. I’m feeling inspired and thought I might spread around a bit of that New Year Cheer and see where, if anywhere, it stuck. Doing so also provides me with something deliciously cringe-worthy to look back on should I not finish the half-marathon, fail Spanish, and/or get kicked out of yoga.
There is no doubt that the foundation of this feeling of goodishness is the flip-side of the oft-alluded-to shake-up I had last year. It was a raw few months, and the act of hurdling the changing calendar has a flavour of New Beginnings to it. It’s maybe a little childish, what with it being just another day ‘n all, but this New Year feels like it is sternly putting the last one to bed. And, hey, a little bit of childishness is a good thing.
So, that’s the foundation. The layers on top of that have been constructed from the bounty of reading, listening and watching material that have been lavished upon me by mates, buddies, friends recently. Normally, in my typical fashion of being unable to listen to anyone else, I would happily accept such well-intentioned offerings then promptly add them to one of the piles of never-read, never-heard items that gather crusts of dust in various corners of the house. But as things fell apart a bit in the autumn, I found myself quite receptive to the ideas of others. When you are broken, you want to be fixed – no matter who does the fixing.
So, anyway, this bunch of offerings tend to fall into one of two categories that have provided this sense of goodishness in the New Year and, in the spirit of Zen Habits they are my commandments for 2009:
1. Be Present
This is the category that plays host to Tolle and Fuck It. For me, it means severing myself from the expectations of what I perceive I should do and trying to find what the hell it is I want to do. That may sound rather simplistic but when you’ve spent a lifetime taking the easy option, chasing money, and playing it safe you quite frightfully wake up one day to the realisation that you no longer know – and aren’t sure if you ever did – what it is you want to do. And just being comfortable with that act of severance, that first step into the unknown, is the beginning…something I think I might have embraced, whew… Why ‘Be Present’? Because it requires, to some degree, the shutting off of yourself off from the conditioning of your past and the fear of an insecure future in order to focus on what it is right now that makes sense.
2. Hack It
A rather different ingredient in my New Year makeup is the fat swag of tools and techniques that make up the genre of Lifehackery, an old dog that has in recent times been given new life on the internet, in books and television. Lifehacking is all about applying systems to your day-to-day life to make it easier and more manageable (theoretically enabling you to do more with your time) and to your goals (and this is where it’s a bit at odds with the ‘Be Present’ thing). Of course it can be an addictive and a sometimes contrary thing – it’s dead easy to spend so much time looking at the theories and tools behind it, chasing the holy grail that will allow you to be all you can be, that you end up treading water and never applying anything you learn. Which is why Merlin Mann (of 43 Folders, one of the big guns) exploded late in 2008 with this post that turned the genre on it’s head and shook many of the addicts from their blurry stupor. Well, me anyway.
So there you have it, my two crimefighting partners in the battle to secure a content, yet fruitful 2009. And that is where I endeavour to leave behind the past few months of cathartic pourings, reflections upon an old year, and the reconstruction of my battered mind. It’s taken up quite enough time, thank you, and an inspired New Year is upon me. I’ll finish with a twitter from Mr Mann:
“Problem is, the more time you spend thinking about creativity, the less time
you spend actually making stuff. Which is a recipe for berets.”
p.s. Yes, I know I promised another list…but I lost interest so thought Fuck It.