Instead of New Year's Resolutions

I refuse to write New Year's resolutions. Also, I am a little in love with Krista Tippett of "On Being" fame. She possesses the perfect mind meld of spirit and science and matters of the heart.

Tippett pivots away from resolutions and towards questions.

She offers a way to find our deepest question for the year, and to go on a journey of discovery to find its answer.

She draws upon Rilke, another one of my favorite writers, from his "Letters To A Young Poet", "Rilke said, try to be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart. Dwell with what is unresolved. Don't treat it as something that you have to rush to an answer for, because if those questions are big and important enough, what you want is to be able to live the answers that they would give you." 

I love this. We need to live these questions and to live with these questions, to know what it would mean to live our way into the answers.

This is such a beautiful way to honor our journeys through life, by respecting and honoring the questions we hold deep in our hearts, and by dwelling inside the questions and get to feel them, smell them, touch them, see them, hear them until their answers are revealed to us.

Tippett goes on to say, "When a new question rises up in us, stops us in our tracks, [t]hose are pivot points. Those are moments when the possibility of discovery breaks in. So the invitation here is to engage the adventure of a new reverence for the questions that are alive in you, the questions that are alive in the world around you."

So often, we rush to find 'the answer'. But form follows function, the medium is the message, the means to the ends is the point, there is no 'there there' without here.

She posits, "[N]ot grasping for the first thing that feels like an answer but moving with curiosity towards it and testing it and not feeling like it's a failure if it turns out that what that was meant was to be an investigation."

This feels so much more relevant and resonant with me than making resolutions, that I would most likely forget about after a month. I feel focused on the joy of my work as an end of life doula and conscious dying educator. I feel happy with my partner and my kids, one of whom is getting married this year which is so joyful and fun. I love learning blues and swing dance, and reading and screening wonderful works. I love my home. I focus both on my health and on activism.

But this year I am moving from sometimes writing to becoming a writer. This has been a slow and solitary evolution, requiring the shedding of copious buckets of doubt. I have joined a writing program for the year. 

So my question is, how can I open to all that is in my heart and mind as I grow my writer's voice?

I would love to hear your question. Please share it with me in the comments below.

Pick up Krista Tippett's book, "Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living" or listen to her podcast, "On Being". She will lift you up.