‘This year will be a time for inner work’, my Chinese horoscope tells me via the third-from-the-top Google search result for ‘Snake Horoscope 2017’.
And actually, I could see how that makes sense.
2016 was a year I would consider to fall largely in the bucket of “procrastination”. My main priority was to get good at dancing, with a secondary priority of getting in some good travel. A check on both counts, but is either of those really progress?
There’s nothing wrong with hobbies, but there’s a problem when your hobbies take over your entire life. I haven’t written anything great in months, I last finished a book 6 months ago, and the only new thing I learned in as long is how to do a handstand. I haven’t even been able to meditate, something I credit with once saving my life.
It’s time to return to the essentials, the things I have always relied on to carry me through a difficult and confusing world, and it so happens that all those things require some inward focus.
I hope that this will be a year of rebirth. That by the end of it, I will have cleared the fog of distraction that has kept me entertained but stagnant for so long, and that I will be better for it. That I will destroy the lull of routine and complacency that have been keeping me from growth.
This post is self-centered. But then I plan to be self-centered. As I once saw scribbled on a bathroom wall, “there is only this”. And I want to make it mine.