It’s that time of year – when we make lists, choose words/questions/resolutions/visions (captured on Vision Boards and in Vision Journals).

word:  coddiwomple:  travel purposely toward an as-yet-unknown destination
question:  is that thought true (a Byron Katie question that never resonated with me until I read something on a FB post that opened it up and made it accessible)
Vision Board:  none to date
resolutions:  none to date

Lists:  2 weeks logged on calendar of things I hope to eventually make a habit.

At the top of the list is exercise.  Two years of upheaval (counting moving from my home of 24 years) have left any semblance of balance, good nutrition, daily movement by the wayside.  Age is also creeping.  Can’t stop age, but can work on the symptoms and so exercise and nutrition are top of the lists for January to March this year.  Lofty goals made by my interior 24 year old who doesn’t understand that things change.  Nothing works as fast as it once did, despite her Aries need for it all to be done, perfectly, yesterday.

Which has caused much rumination on my part about exactly what it is that I want (in a perfect world, 5 minutes of exercise would sculpt, and food would adjust its calories to what my body needs and discard the rest – all the yummy pastas and chocolate and cookies that I mostly forwent over the holidays to get an early start on getting a handle on eating somewhat healthily from here on out).

I may never know.  What I want is a moving object and the personal/business/spiritual never seem to mesh – it’s like holding the reins on teams of horses all moving in different directions.  If I don’t let go of something, there will be no me to do anything at all.

Four days into the New Year I realize, working with my calendared lists (of no more than 7 things a day), that 3 things will arrive that were unanticipated, will mostly take 2 – 4 hours, and even the things I calendared and houred will take 2 to 3 times longer than anticipated.  The 24 year old remembers lining things up and knocking them down faster than anticipated, and an extremely responsive body to diet and exercise.

In the end, it’s the perfection thing:  do it all, do it now, do it better than anyone else, arise tomorrow shining and new.  I don’t think it every worked that way, my inner 24 year old be damned (or at least shut up).

This morning I’m following along doing my necessary 1/2 hour daily reading (it’s usually more than that, but I calendared 1/2 hour because I want to be sure reading doesn’t get lost in the shuffle, as it often does) reading Rebecca Solnit (a late comer to my very favorite writers list…and she’s prolific – yay!), “A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  Appropriate, right?  It’s the perfect book for ruminations at the beginning of the year.

“The mind too can be imagined as a landscape, but only the minds of sages might resemble the short-grass prairie in which i played with getting lost and vanishing.  The rest of us have caverns, glaciers, torrential rivers, heavy fogs, chasms that open up underfoot, even marauding wildlife bearing family names.  It’s a landscape in which getting lost is easy and some regions are terrifying to visit.  There’s a Buddhist sotry about a man galloping by a monk who asks Where are you goinr?  Ask my horse, says the man.”

My broker, a man I admire, once an engineer who still thinks in that organized progression that engineer types think in, says something along the line of you have to measure it (whatever it is) if you want to change it (as in get better).  I nod.  Such a logical thought.  Makes sense to me.  But measures put me on edge, throw me into perfectionism (I give that to my Catholic school upbringing where girls (women) are responsible for *everything* in the world.  If it doesn’t work, it’s our fault).  Perfectionism is counter productive.  I’m willing to believe that but try telling it to my 24 year old inner self.

Further on, Solnit notes:

Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house [say for instance children of alcoholics], find our own ground, build from scratch…As a cultural metamorphosis the transition is far more dramatic.

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle.  In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who ‘knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration.  Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar…” We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning.  Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as thought it were as graceful as a flower blooming….

[in a butterfly hatchery] They came out with their wings packed down like furled parachutes…Each clung to it chrysalis while its wings unfolded by almost imperceptible stages.  Some did not get quite free, and their wings never fully straightened.  One butterfly sat will with an orange wing curled into the chrysalis.  One seemed permanently stuck halfway out…One flailed frantically, trying to drag itself out by crawling onto adjacent unopened chrysalises until they too began to thrash, a contagious panic.  That one finally dropped free, though it may have been too late for its wings to straighten.  The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt.

In 2011 I wrote that Caterpillars are a bad metaphor for change.  

But Solnit has expanded the metaphor by adding decay and crisis and it begins to feel right.

Two years of decay and crisis.  Hopefully 2019 I’ve gotten to the part where I have wings and I can spread them.