Monday, December 03, 2007
Reflections on 2007:
As I reach the end of another calendar year I find myself looking back over the year and evaluating it. Mostly it was a good year. A couple of bad things happened but we survived them and life goes on. Nobody died this year, which is a good thing.
I did not accomplish as much as I had hoped this past year, and I'm hoping next year will be more productive. I got a lot of work done but I have not completed my most important project – the release of my first novel. Stuart and I have done a lot of the final corrections but we're not done yet.
I'm not going to blame any of it on Stuart as I've been just as distracted as he has. I developed more productive work habits, but then everything went by the wayside when the holidays hit. I always know that will happen the closer we get to Thanksgiving, so I've learned not to fight it, to accept this time of year as busy and distracting. Come January 02, 2008 and it will be right back to work.
Most of my friends have had a hard year by all accounts, and I've worried about them from time to time. I fear their hard times have not ended with the holidays or the changing of the calendar, though I continue to hold them in my meditations and prayers, and I continue to "hold them in the Light," (as the Quakers say.)
I've always liked that expression and the action behind it; to "hold someone in the Light." Great spiritual ideas can come from many different places.
So I hope and pray that 2008 will be a better year for all my friends and family.
The greater world has also had a hard year. Between the two disastrous wars our country is engaged in, the bust in the housing market, and a lot of chickens starting to come home to roost – the United States is not in its usual "cat-bird seat." Our short-on-brains President let his greedy little buddies run rampant and they've made a much bigger mess of things. (All those brilliant bloggers we like to read have covered Le Grande Spectacle.)
There have also been a number of books released this past year that give us a truer picture of what's going on than our mass media, which I largely ignore. I've learned to just not pay attention to their blather, as well as my decision last year to divorce myself from the American mass media. My decision months ago to stop watching TV was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I plan to keep ignoring the mass media as we enter 2008.
I learn a lot more from reading good books anyway, and NetFlix keeps movies and shows coming to my mailbox so I'm hardly starved for entertainment. My TV is basically a monitor for my DVD player.
Like most of us I'm going to have a lot of work to do once the holidays are over, which is (partly) why I'm really looking forward to our trip to Argentina and Peru in the last half of December. This is the time of year Erik and I go an explore a new corner of the world. We've seen so many great places and we've hardly scratched the surface.
It's a marvelous and wondrous planet, and we've met so many great people and seen things I used to dream of seeing; New Zealand, the Great Barrier Reef, the Australian Outback, Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico. The list (and the memories) grow with every trip.
But the nicest part has been sharing these experiences with someone I love. It's so much more fun when you can share the experience with someone else. Erik and I treasure the adventures we share.
Our country has been going through a very dark time, and I'm hoping we are starting to see some light at the end of that tunnel. But the men in power have done a lot of damage, and they're going to try and slink away and leave us to clean up their mess. I sincerely hope we don't let them.
But for our country to come through this, and for all of us to come through this, we have to put aside our apathy and deal with our democracy, and that may be the hardest thing of all.
As I reach the end of another calendar year I find myself looking back over the year and evaluating it. Mostly it was a good year. A couple of bad things happened but we survived them and life goes on. Nobody died this year, which is a good thing.
I did not accomplish as much as I had hoped this past year, and I'm hoping next year will be more productive. I got a lot of work done but I have not completed my most important project – the release of my first novel. Stuart and I have done a lot of the final corrections but we're not done yet.
I'm not going to blame any of it on Stuart as I've been just as distracted as he has. I developed more productive work habits, but then everything went by the wayside when the holidays hit. I always know that will happen the closer we get to Thanksgiving, so I've learned not to fight it, to accept this time of year as busy and distracting. Come January 02, 2008 and it will be right back to work.
Most of my friends have had a hard year by all accounts, and I've worried about them from time to time. I fear their hard times have not ended with the holidays or the changing of the calendar, though I continue to hold them in my meditations and prayers, and I continue to "hold them in the Light," (as the Quakers say.)
I've always liked that expression and the action behind it; to "hold someone in the Light." Great spiritual ideas can come from many different places.
So I hope and pray that 2008 will be a better year for all my friends and family.
The greater world has also had a hard year. Between the two disastrous wars our country is engaged in, the bust in the housing market, and a lot of chickens starting to come home to roost – the United States is not in its usual "cat-bird seat." Our short-on-brains President let his greedy little buddies run rampant and they've made a much bigger mess of things. (All those brilliant bloggers we like to read have covered Le Grande Spectacle.)
There have also been a number of books released this past year that give us a truer picture of what's going on than our mass media, which I largely ignore. I've learned to just not pay attention to their blather, as well as my decision last year to divorce myself from the American mass media. My decision months ago to stop watching TV was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I plan to keep ignoring the mass media as we enter 2008.
I learn a lot more from reading good books anyway, and NetFlix keeps movies and shows coming to my mailbox so I'm hardly starved for entertainment. My TV is basically a monitor for my DVD player.
Like most of us I'm going to have a lot of work to do once the holidays are over, which is (partly) why I'm really looking forward to our trip to Argentina and Peru in the last half of December. This is the time of year Erik and I go an explore a new corner of the world. We've seen so many great places and we've hardly scratched the surface.
It's a marvelous and wondrous planet, and we've met so many great people and seen things I used to dream of seeing; New Zealand, the Great Barrier Reef, the Australian Outback, Hawaii, Alaska, Mexico. The list (and the memories) grow with every trip.
But the nicest part has been sharing these experiences with someone I love. It's so much more fun when you can share the experience with someone else. Erik and I treasure the adventures we share.
Our country has been going through a very dark time, and I'm hoping we are starting to see some light at the end of that tunnel. But the men in power have done a lot of damage, and they're going to try and slink away and leave us to clean up their mess. I sincerely hope we don't let them.
But for our country to come through this, and for all of us to come through this, we have to put aside our apathy and deal with our democracy, and that may be the hardest thing of all.
# posted by Phillip T. Alden @ 4:40 PM 
