So: Happy new year to everybody! What ever that means... again a year has passed and a new year is starting, fresh like a baby newborn or a flower in buds - full of hope and promise and everytime we all fall in the trap of a new beginning, actually quite sweet.
I ask myself, where the last two years have gone? Did people during the great wars have this sort of feeling, of time simply lost and passed and gone and nothing to show for it? And then taking it up where they left, in our case in March 2020? I am not sure. But very curious.
As it is, a new year is always this little opportunity given to one to make a fresh start, like in Monopoly when you pass a certain field, go back to start and off you go again: Do make obnoxious new years resolutions like stop smoking and be being kind to everyone on the road, or stopping to eat at all ( after all all this intermittent fasting stuff is supposed to work, but never with me - I seem to come from Mars, it is dawing on me...) or doing more exercise - all in all always something which is taken solemnly on by oath and then abandoned pretty soon, around 14th of January when you are a normal person.
I am learning and have a smallish plan for this year: to do more of the things, which really really give me joy AND are good for me.
Like Plan 1: drinking these two huge glasses of water in the morning after getting up. Not warmed, not with the odd lemon pressed, not with standing on one foot or only after doing 45 minutes of yoga - forget it. Only to drink two huge glasses of filtered water. Should be possible to survive the 15 January threshold. I hope so at least.
Plan 2: Turn out the light at 23.00, not earlier and not later. So, no permission any longer to self to coming home from the office at 19.30, putting on pajamas and going to bed at 20.00 - then being wide awake at 1.00 and starting to do the thinking roundabout until 4.00 and then falling asleep and being knackered at 7.00 when the alarm clock shrills. No, no, no - not any more.
Or Plan 3: write more and give a damn if it is interesting or not. Like this post here. Just do it and leave it out there in the wilderness.
My zodiac sign is Leo, this explains it all I think. Since I learnt how lions do operate their day to day I have always the best explanation for being who I am and not being ashamed of it: They hunt hard for ca 3 hours a day, then lay down on the plane, keeping one eye on the kids and the other one on the plane, looking what's up, how the wind blows and what to have for lunch tomorrow, resting in the shade and feeling calm and happy. Being a woman lion, of course there are the kids to be taken care of, but none of them is under 10 any more, so hunting is ok and resting as well.
Still, one problem persists: the brain does not stop working and the always present question of "What next in this life?" is a humming background sound and keeps one up during the night, a bit like a tinnitus. Montaigne is clever when he said that when he writes he writes, when he sleeps, he sleeps. I cannot yet follow this example and my head looks more like a market place in Samarkant on a Saturday morning at 11.00 - or at least I imagine that it looks like that, never have been there, just imagine.
Long speech for starting then new year and short message: make it easier on yourself and do enjoy more. Which in turn makes everyone of us a more enjoyable person to be with and does indeed help not to take oneself too important, and become slightly mad in the process, with or without Santa Corona, because we are all too much alone in our minds and have too many expectations how happiness should look like. Reading the Stoics and Montaigne and some other clever people I think happiness has a lot to do with contentment and sunbeams playing on the river of our lives, at 17.00 hours on a calm summer afternoon, not more and not less. Very philosophical, I know.
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