Year end review

I came across this website of year-end reflection prompts by way of a recent post from a lovely friend.  While I am not so sold on the idea that we can "manifest what's next" (it's a little too a-la-The-Secret bunk for my taste), I do believe that reflective practice is often what makes our next steps most clear, and helps us appreciate the depths of our past experiences.  Forgive the self-indulgence of my posting my answers (even if somewhat edited for cyber privacy) here.  I invite you to do the same, if you are the same sort of person.

1) Encapsulate 2010 in one word.  What one word would you like to encapsulate 2011?
As a former English major, I have a hard time with the one word questions, so perhaps I should stick with potent imagery.  I pulled a 10 of Swords as my overall year card in the reading I did for 2010, and I feel it has encapsulated my year in many ways.  As for the new year, I pulled the Ace of Cups.  And I do hope the meaning of the Ace of Cups (love, mostly) will encapsulate 2011.

2) What do you do each day that doesn't contribute to your writing, and how can you eliminate it?
I do not have cable at my apartment, but I watch television shows on my computer...I'd like to watch less.  Television is horrible for both inspiration and productivity in writing (although it is fantastic for hedonism!).

3) What one moment did you feel most alive this year?
I remember the first night I was in Lewes, Delaware, and there was two feet of frozen snow on the ground, and the main street was practically empty on a February weekend evening.  It was cold, and you had to toddle everywhere over the ice and snow, and I had on my boots and hat and heavy down coat.  But my partner was with me, and the sun was setting, and I was free, and fully myself, and joyful.

4) How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?
Does being super invested in Harry Potter 7 count?

5) What (or whom) did you let go of this year?
I let go of dissertation topics and advisors, of mentors and friends who never were, and of attachments and obligations and responsibilities that were my own creations.

6) What was the last thing you made?  What materials did you use?  Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?
The last thing I made was a chocolate raspberry torte, which was made of all of the things we don't like to know we are eating, plus it was the first time I used my largest tart pan.  I want to bake many more desserts this year, as baking is something I don't realize I'm missing until I pull out the mixing bowls again.  There is nothing so grounding as cracking an egg over a bowl of sugar, or running a spatula around the edges to mix in all the dry ingredients, nor does any other practice have such a rewarding end result.

7) Where have you discovered community in 2010?  What community would you like to join, create, or more deeply connect with in 2011?
Rather than discovering community itself, I have discovered the precious, precariousness of community.  I have re-remembered where community is not, and where my community continues to be.  I would like to continue to nurture the community I have, and build on it where I go next.

8) What makes you beautifully different?  What do you do that lights people up?
Baking is not all that unique or different, but people are always happy to eat it.

9) What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010?
A July wedding of friends in Greensboro, North Carolina.  I was grateful for the chance to see many friends again, all together in one place for a brief few hours.  Also, to eat cake!  And to dance!

10) What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?
It's been an all-around wise-up year, if I do say so myself.  But the wisest was perhaps to cut to the chase already and get on with it.  When I know how it plays out, I'll tell you.

11) What are 11 things you life doesn't need in 2011?  How will you go about eliminating them?  How will getting rid of them change your life?
Here are four: over-planning, excessive doubt, war movies, and skipping dessert.  I propose to get eliminate them by doing my best never to skip dessert.

12) When did you feel most integrated with your body this past year?  Did you have a moment when there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU?
After four extremely painful hours, there was a permanent picture on my back.  I didn't feel that integrated afterward (in fact, I felt pretty terrible), and for a time I panicked and fretted about whether I had made the right choice.  But the healing process takes over two weeks, and caring for such a large wound requires meticulous care and attention.  The tenderness faded as I tended my back, and as it healed, so did I.  So the cohesive me was a process, not a moment.

13) When it comes to aspirations, it's about action, not ideas.  What is your next step?
To actually do what it is I have been promising myself and my partner for two and a half years.

14) What's one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year?  How do you express gratitude for it?
Fancy bourgeois food!  I am on a limited budget, but a similarly-economical friend and I have started up monthly fancy restaurant visits, and my partner shares a penchant for fancy food that is probably not the wisest expenditure (but it's so awesome!!  Why do bourgeois things have to be so awesome?!)  I think gratitude comes in some degree of scarcity, and knowing that it is a gift to oneself to go out in a place too pretty for you once in a while.

15) Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes.  What do you most want to remember?
Don't retake your comprehensive exams - you finished those, okay?

16) How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year?  Was it a gradual change, or a sudden burst?
In one hour, an acquaintance showed me that there wasn't any reason to keep myself from my greatest desires.  Soul-starving need not be self-imposed.  Sometimes the best way we can love ourselves is to know we are already worth what we most want.

17) What's the best thing you learned about yourself this year?  And how will you apply that lesson going forward?
That I make for a decent instructor!  I really do know what I'm doing after all...and I should not be so afraid of it.  But I also learned that it's alright to not to commit myself to it...we can be good at many things, but we'll never know what we'll miss unless we try something else for a while.

18) What do you want to try in 2011?  Is there something you wanted to try in 2010?  What happened when you did or didn't go for it?
I want to try to recultivate the spirit...to burn more candles, have more quiet moments, to maybe visit the local meetinghouse for Sunday service.

19) What healed you this year?  Was it sudden or gradual?  How would you like to be healed in 2011?
See #16.  That is healing enough.

20) What should you have done this year but didn't because you were too worried, unsure, busy, or otherwise deterred from doing it?  (Will you do it?)
I am a woman who acts, so I don't think there is anything I didn't do that I should have done.  (There were, however, things I probably shouldn't have done that I did!)

21) Imagine yourself five years from now.  What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead?
Let go.  Don't try to harness your fate.  Let your life happen with you.  And yes, this is the best thing...there will always be regrets, but no one ever regrets not regretting enough.  You already have all the tools you need.

22) Where did you travel this year?  How or where would you like to travel next year?
Lewes and Rehoboth, Boston and Cambridge, Ontario, Niagara Falls, Atlanta, Northampton, Greensboro, Asheville, Cary, Chapel Hill, Greenville, and many precious trips to D.C.  Next year I will go to San Francisco!  And Philadelphia!  And hopefully a much, much longer stay in D.C.

23) If you could introduce yourself to strangers with a new name for a day, what would it be and why?
Just my own name is fine...I've come round to it.

24) What's the best moment that could serve as proof that everything is going to be alright?  How will you incorporate that discovery in the year ahead?
My grandfather's funeral was sort of comedic, what with the pastor starting the prayers while my father was in the middle of a loud conversation about the weather with the undertaker as he carried the urn, then my sister forgetting she was the youngest grandchild, the sudden a capella burst into "Wind Beneath My Wings," and my father driving back to the cemetery later and taking a picture of the wrong plot.  We are only human, and there is comfort in that.  We will always have reasons to laugh at each other and at ourselves.

25) What one photo from the past year best captures you, either who you are or who you strive to be?
The best photo, I think, was the first photo of the year of me.  It was taken at a barbecue place in northern Virginia.  I was digging into pork and beans and macaroni and cheese - it's not that I want to be seen as uber-carnivorous, but I was eating on a wooden table in the sunlight of the window, and I like how content I look (although it could be that I was about to tear into a pulled pork sandwich).  I look like someone who knows herself, or at least is at home in a barbecue restaurant.

26) What did you eat this year that you will never forget?  What went in your mouth and touched your soul?
Dates stuffed with chorizo and goat cheese.  From a tiny, empty wine bar in my eastern North Carolina hometown.  OMG like candy.  Also, burnt brown sugar ice cream from a local shop in Northampton, Massachusetts.  And a fried chicken sandwich in Asheville.

27) What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this past year?
It was in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my lovely friend had an unfortunate encounter with a plastic coffee cup lid because of my insistence that she "push harder" on the top to open it.  Such a silly moment is the kind of moment our friendship is full of.

28) What's one thing you most want to achieve next year?  How do you imagine you will feel when you get to it?
Transitioning from a long-distance relationship to living under the same roof.  I think it will feel wonderful, although we might wish the other person would go away once in a while.  That is the beauty of it - we will have the privilege of taking each other for granted.

29) Describe a defining moment (or series of moments) that has affected your life this year.
For some reason I can only thing of poignant, sad moments in response to this question, although there are funny realizations that come of them.  There was one time when I was so overwhelmed by what I saw as my tragic, dour situation that I burst into tears in my shower and proceeded to have a very good, long cry in the bathroom.  Not long afterwards, new neighbors moved in below me, and they were much noisier than the previous tenants.  They were so noisy, in fact, that I realized the walls are thinnest between the bathrooms!  So now I don't cry in the bathroom.

30) What's the most memorable gift, tangible or intangible, that you received this year?
I received a gift of loss.  Many losses, I think.  My grandfather's death seemed to set my father freer, even amid the tragedy.  I lost (or reoriented...'lost' might be too extreme) many friendships over this year, and a mentor I never really had to begin with.  These are gifts, though, because losing them allowed me to see where my strongest relationships still lay, and to prioritize what I wanted (because how could doing what I wanted to do hurt anyone else when not doing what I wanted to do was hurting myself?)

31) What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world?
The central story is something like integrity and living rightly, and homecoming.  I don't know how I share it with the world, yet...I don't know if I want to share it with the whole wide world, just the people who are the world to me.  We will keep believing a better world is possible, and building it as we go.