Planning 2015 – Becoming is the Word!

Like a lot of introverts, the thought of going out and braving the drunken crowds on New Year’s Eve fills me with dread. For a long time now, the way I celebrate is at home, alone, with a journal and a pen, reflecting on the year just gone, and dreaming for the one about to start. This year, for the first time, I also actively worked on goals I would like to achieve and projects I would like to work on.

One of life’s big (and recurring) lessons for me is the one Robert Burns wrote as

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley

Or as we better know it: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”

Now awry is a word with negative connotations, but a plan deviating from the expected course need not necessarily be something to wring our hands over.

Last year, I became a journalist. If someone had ever told me I would be a journalist, I would have scoffed at them and Harry the Self-Invalidating Hamster would have stuck his pointy little rodent-nose and ticklish whiskers into my ear and laughed long and annoyingly squeakily.

Becoming a journalist was not in my plans. Ever. It was a very big surprise to be honest. Thanks to the (admittedly self-serving) constant prodding of someone to apply for a journalist position that was advertised, I applied for the job to get the person off my back, to shut them up, telling them as I had no experience at all there wasn’t a chance in hell I would get the position. Well it appeared that hell wanted to prove me wrong, and as I went through the interview processes I started to really want the job.

And here I now am, working as a journalist for a couple of days a week on a rural community newspaper … and it is one of the best things that has happened to me.

I love my job. I LOVE my job. It’s the first job in my entire life I’ve been able to say that about, and so passionately. I meet the best people, and I get to WRITE for a living.

So here I have wasted four paragraphs deviating from the plan of this blog post, which was to announce that my Word for 2015 is ‘Become’.

I may be a few years behind the eight-ball, but apparently choosing a Word For the Year is quite the trendy thing to do. Now I didn’t just pull a word out of … a hat and declare ‘that will do’. Being the perfectionist I am I had to really work at it, and to help me along I used a free five-day ‘email course’, available through Susannah Conway’s site.
While there I also downloaded her Unraveling the Year Ahead 2015 workbook to help me with goal planning and I printed it in A5 and stuck it in my Goals Filofax, but this post is already over-wordy and that’s a post for another day.

Why ‘Become’? It works in many areas for me. Friendship, for one. Becoming a better friend and becoming friends with new people. Becoming a better journalist, becoming a writer … I see writing, as friendship, as a never-ending process of growth. And this is a major reason for resurrecting this blog … writing practice.

Becoming financially responsible is one of my major goals this year, as is becoming more mindful, meditating more, and getting back into yoga. Becoming more organised is on my agenda every year, particularly in regards to the home front, unfortunately. Becoming able to use my beautiful expensive camera on its manual settings and becoming a MUCH better guitarist are also on my goals list.

I intend recording my progress along these different paths here on the blog throughout the year, and I hope you can follow along with me, and perhaps tell me what your goals are and how they are going.

When I think of the words become and becoming, I have a visceral feeling of expansion from my centre in all directions, of growth, of aiming to reach potential. To me it’s a beautiful word.

Do you have a word for 2015? If you don’t, what words do you think would work for you this year?

Amen.

I learned that who doesn’t look for you, doesn’t miss you and who doesn’t miss you doesn’t care for you… that destiny determines who enters your life but you decide who stays… that the truth hurts only once and a lie every time you remember it. There are three things in life that leave and never return: words, time and opportunities… therefore, value whoever values you and don’t treat as a priority whoever treats you as an option.

 

From filofax to commonplace books to marginalia to Mark Twain…

EVERYTHING turns itself back to university, it seems. I can’t escape.

I found this quote by Mark Twain this evening, via the circuitous route outlined above:

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man…it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.”

This evening I completed an essay on H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau for my Victorian Literature and Culture unit. My thesis was pretty much based along the same thoughts of the above quote. Well, not ENTIRELY, but it fits so well.

Tomorrow I have to write an essay on Jane Eyre and British colonialism (ugh). It is due midnight tomorrow night. I will be SO glad when this unit is done.

Next stop, Shax (aka known as Shakespeare, for the dirty unwashed!)

 

Here’s one to follow…

The 10 minute writer over at blogspot. Bookmarked here so I can find it easily, though I am following by email. She posts writing exercises to get people writing for 10 minutes at a time, and to get the creative juju flowing.

What an inspiring woman!

And no, I won’t be posting my writings. I need to write knowing I don’t have an audience so I’m not ‘editing the ugly out of my bio’

Last night, I dreamed I of a sentence I was writing, and thought to myself, oo that is good, I am going to put that in a novel. Huh. I was having these dreams in 2008 when I was going through chemo and radiotherapy. Huh. I NEVER remember the text though *sigh*

 

Don’t google your name.

Don’t google your name.  Ever.

Don’t “search” for yourself

on anything that glows in the dark.

Don’t let your beauty

be something anyone can turn off.

Don’t edit your ugly out of your bio.

Let your light come from the fire.

Let your pain be the spark,

but not the timber.

Remember, you didn’t come here

to write your heart out.

You came to write it in.

by Andrea Gibson

Sometimes, a lot of the time, there is no need to write when somebody says it so eloquently for you (that’s my excuse for this particular laziness, anyway). Not that I wanted to say this, but that it is a ‘hell YEAH’ reminder to stand up straight, lift your chin in, and live your life in defiance of those that would turn your beauty off.

 

Sonnet I

Beez are buzzing in my head and pain is starting to settle on my forehead. I feel the flu coming on.  And just as I was about to go warm up on the front verandah and read in the sun, the lawnmower man has arrived. I think a lay down on the lounge is the order of the afternoon. As other countries know that winter starts with the equinox or solstice or whateveritis, I know winter has started when the cat suddenly gets very affectionate and likes to lie on top of me. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking he actually likes me, but the reality is that he is just a heat-seeking body.

I have been meaning to post properly for a while, probably an inaugural ‘planner’ post to appease the Filofax gods. Notice I didn’t capitalise the word god. The jury’s still out since my sister died. I am rambling. Yes, I’m definintely coming down with the Dreaded Lurgy.

My sole reason for popping back for a bit was to share what I did on the last New Year’s Eve.

 

As I look back upon the months gone by,

and breathless, contemplate a loved one’s end,

I ponder on the grief that makes me cry

and wonder how it is we humans mend.

For lessons in humanity we learn,

When one we treasure leaves this earthly plane,

When we are left to in the darkness yearn,

We realise that ALL humans suffer pain.

 

The soul then takes a breath and comprehends

that right beside us, if we are aware,

are those who’ll always be there, our lov’d friends,

who gently nurture us through deep despair.

It’s love and cherished friendship that transcends,

The burden of humanity we share.

 

Yep. That’s what I did and all I did. I wrote a sonnet. My partying days are over and  I have a habit of reflecting and journalling on NYE. Of course the first year of grieving was highest on my mind, and so instead of journalling, out popped a sonnet. I’m quite surprised that I managed it … I didn’t set out to write a sonnet, and after all it’s got all the right and proper requirements of a REAL sonnet (as opposed to my pretend one?). It has the quatrains/octet and sextet and volta and rhyming scheme and iambic pentameter and all. It’s not strictly Petrachan, Spensarian or Shakespearean in form but more of a melding of the three. A Jularian as it were. thyggghb the cat said as it walked across my keyboard in search of my lap. Muwahhahahaha says the Lurgy as it passes through my glands and scratches its way down my throat with rampant rapidity.

lurgi

Haiku, and “A Little Sense of Music”

Tonight I found some old poetry I had written and forgotten about. A haiku:

A mirror to you …
I reflect back your beauty
and you are entranced.

And this:

A Little Sense of Music

The question is not of harmony
the length of phrase
the breadth of lyric

it is that you inflame my inner song
that you are the long fingers
to my quivering strings.