Red Leopard

2010 sucked.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot good happened in 2010. But as a vintage, it sucked. Big donkey balls.

At 2010’s wake, we make New Year’s resolutions in hopes that doing so will wash the taste out of our mouths. It’s what we do. Like paying taxes in April. Creatures of habit, that’s what we are. One of those habits is making resolutions at year’s end.

Sometimes a resolution is vague…as in, “I will lose weight.” But being the innately masochistic sufferers that we are, a resolution usually details the burden…as in, “I will wake at 5am and work out at Gold’s Gym for 2 hours every workday morning.”

In either case, we are liars and know it. Still, we make the resolution. And still yet, we can’t get that donkey ball taste out of our mouths. But for a short while, we live the fantasy that we are doing something about our pathetic lives.

2010 sucked and my mouth tastes of donkey balls.

Such is the nature of being human, its essence intrinsic in our art. Maybe that’s why Country Music is so popular. It’s raw, authentic and touches on a universal truth: Life is Suffering.

I’m not making resolutions this year. No empty promises to the gods in hopes they shine a little fortune my way. Nope. This year, I’m going tactical. Search and destroy: looking past; looking present; looking future.

What does that mean? It means, I will not make a list of habitual patterns of behavior and how I will change them. What I will do am doing is practicing awareness of my life: lived, living, and to be lived.

• Which relationships are toxic?
• Which relationships are neglected?
• Which loose ends need attention?
• Which loose ends can I write off?
• What dreams have been tabled?
  • For more than a year?
  • For more than 2 years?
  • For more than 10 years?
• Where do I compromise?

Stuff like that.

Aristotle noted that, “We are what we repeatedly do.”

It’s a chicken and egg dilemma but Ari gets it right. We are creatures of habit.

Look, life happens each moment and in each moment we handle life. Spouting resolutions at years end doesn’t change a thing. It’s the myriad small changes at each moment during the year that alters a course. All we really have is now, the present moment. But that’s all you need. In each moment, you can see your whole life.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour… –W. Blake

To bend what you do in any moment is to bend the universe. It’s in each single moment that habits are broken and entire new worlds are born.

The closest thing I have to a resolution this year is to practice standing in each moment, eight sides open.