A New Year

Gotta tell ya, seeing this movie in the theater today was a great start to the year! Kinda made up for the fact that The Rose Parade, which I faithfully watch each New Year's morning snuggled under a quilt and sipping champagne-spiked orange juice, is postponed until tomorrow. I always forget they do that when the New Year kicks off on a Sunday. I haven't done much else today, except lose myself in a new novel and sit down with my calendars to transfer birthdays/anniversaries and note any meetings and appointments already clamoring for my attention in the days to come. As always, I also use this exercise as a chance to review what transpired during the year - trips I took, visits from friends, exhibit openings, dental traumas. For the most part, the memories are excellent.

As I've been reading others' blogs, I was reminded that I now do the resolution word to keep me on track throughout the year. Geez, I realized I couldn't remember what I'd picked for this year and had to look it up. Oh, yes: refocus, because in 2010 my word was "focus" and I'd gotten totally derailed by medical issues, anger and resentment (see this post which manages to put a positive spin on 2010 anyway). I'd gone into survival mode and not only struggled with my art, but struggled with relationships, essentially shutting myself off and throwing up defenses. But before the year was over, I knew I couldn't keep living like that, didn't want to keep living like that. So in addition to refocusing in 2011, I soon added a second resolution word: engage. The only way out of my hole, I realized, was to engage with life again, and not let opportunities slip through my fingers out of fear, laziness, inattentiveness or the other myriad ways we allow life to pass us by. Engage I did, and what a difference taking on that word made. Slowly but surely, I started taking risks, opened myself to others, tested various waters, healed both physically and emotionally, and began to reap the benefits of that openness in the response of others. So many wonderful experiences came my way in 2011 and as the year came to a close, I could see how far I'd come from where I started at the beginning of the year. It was months of hard work, actually, realizing just how much I'd lost myself that bad year, and lost my passion for quilting, what a mighty struggle it was not only to reclaim either but even remember what either had been like. But eventually, I got my feet under me once more, partly due to the engaging with life again, and the people I engaged with that helped me along the way. Not sure the passion has come back totally, but at least by the close of the year I again felt enthusiasm for my work. Throughout the year, few more ancient projects got finished, a couple of "problem" quilts got fixed, a few old ideas finally made there way to the "let's get started on this" phase, and new ideas kept bubbling up.

So what to choose for this year's word? That took about 2 seconds to decide and is actually a pairing of words: balance & harmony. It was the focus of my last yoga class of 2011 and I immediately realized what a perfect emphasis that would be for my life right now. Who doesn't want harmony in their life, especially the internal kind and balance is always something I've struggled to maintain, being such an "all or nothing" person. Balance and harmony are also elements I struggled to attain in my designing. So balance & harmony it is!

Happy New Year to you all, and may you too find balance and harmony in 2012.