Greetings friends, and welcome to the first day of the year that Mayans postdated all of their checks to. I hope that you all had a pleasant transition into the New Year spent with good company and even better drinks to celebrate.
I originally had a post that was set to go up before the turn of the New Year designed to summarize 2011, but it just wasn’t worth the time and effort of putting it all together.
I won’t go through the bore of recreating the entire post, but I’ll give you the highlights: The overall theme of the piece had to do with dealing with a series of events that are out of your control. For example, last year I had the pleasure of seeing my car get vandalized not once, but twice in the span of a two-week period. Although the relative cost of fixing the car was more inconvenient than financially taxing, the inability to find some form of justice or resolution—along with a set of circumstantial events and professional setbacks—seemed to turn a simple set of attacks on my car into much, much more. Overall, the sum of the parts seemed to manifest into a bigger issue of being frustrated and angry at the bitch that is fate.
Ultimately, I decided to scrap the piece together and save material for another time (the story about my first vandalism is certainly worth sharing and something I’ll likely address at some point in the foreseeable future). While there was initially a great deal of anger attached to those issues, I realized they were far from debilitating. It would take more than broken glass and a stolen GPS to break me. With that, there was really no need to go through all that anger again to get to the catharsis. I’m already there.
But, as it turns out, I can’t solve destiny. Not just the concept, but the mindset attached. If the future is predetermined, there’s not exactly a lot I can do about it—and really, it’s a philosophical conversation that’s beyond my time and interest. I do much better living in the moment. And the moment I exist in now is every bit as restless and unwilling to just stand idly by. Perhaps there is a natural order to this all and no matter what we do we still end up at a predetermined stop. But the types of goals I have in life and things that I want to do in the New Year have little to do with coasting or allowing things to happen on their own. If the future is indeed all set, then I suppose I have everything I need at my disposal right now. Just means I have to make the most of it.
So as we all go out of our way to make proclamations and resolutions, I come into 2012 with more of a mindset, void of any set expectations. Rather then telling you what I will or will not do, I’d rather like to put out a small phrase that can be part rallying cry, part affirmation. Hell, maybe even just some nonsensical phrase I’ll say when the shit’s about to get rough or what I want to remember when someone says the phrase "it's out of your hands."
As most things in my life get equated to music in some form or another, I think there’s a particular song that pretty much explains my current frame of mind. I care not how you interpret it. Take it however you will.
