Building on what worked in 2015, I’m ready to wave my arm around and point in some general directions of where I’d like to go over the next 366 days.
First on the list—because I’m convinced it helps with everything else—is to continue my meditation practice. In the latter part of 2015, I meditated on 35% of days, and for 2016 I’ll up that to 50% of days.
Currently, I do a little yoga before sitting, and I’m going to expand that by attending a regular weekly class, as I did prior to being injured back in early 2012. I’ll begin by attending a Level 1 class by my old yoga teacher, Vicki Russell Bell, for a few months. If it goes well, and I can build up some strength and flexibility, I’ll begin attending her Level 2-4 class weekly.
I journal a bit after each sitting meditation, and I will continue that part of the practice as well.
With support from my practice, I aim to be more aware, more of the time, of my breath and presence and of being grounded in contentment.
In particular, I’ll make further progress accepting my PTSD, examining it, familiarizing myself with it, inviting it in for tea. At the same time, because I don’t want or need to guarantee it permanent residence, I’ll continue with therapy, including investigating, during the course of 2016, some adjunct somatic therapies (such as EMDR).
I’m identifying two values on which I intend to strengthen my attention:
- Parenting and family life, and
- Cultivating my creativity.
During 2016, Zoe will go from being six-and-a-half to being seven-and-a-half, a significant leg of her journey through childhood. Right now, Melanie and I are pondering how best to help her learn about disappointment. For all of us, it’s a revealing (and never-completed) life lesson and a big piece of what makes up character.
Parenting happens in the now, and effective parenting is all about achieving and maintaining a calm, loving, engaged, and contingent mindset. No one can do that always, but I’m going to be looking back, as I review each day, and coach myself to be here now whenever I can, but most of all when I’m interacting with my kid.
The most satisfying times I’ve had as an engineer—and in retrospect, the ones that have opened the doors to success—have been when I was creating something new. Of course, I’ve also had creative moments that brought on conflict and led to disappointment. Sometimes people don’t want a new and better solution. Sometimes what looked like a good solution, in that creative moment, just isn’t.
Outcomes aside, those creative moments haven’t been as frequent as I’d like. It’s not so much that I’m risk-averse; it’s that I haven’t yet connected my grounding in contentment, so recently and tentatively achieved, with exercising my right-brain. I create, but to create with soul… that’s been like a prize to which I’ve felt I’m not entitled.
In 2016, I’m going to stretch and work my corpus callosum—that connection between the brain’s hemispheres. I’m going to start with putting more time, and more of myself, into practicing the guitar. And writing.
Those are the main intentions I have for the coming year. I have quite a few others, having to do with finances, the amount of time I spend working, and my domicile. I’ll write about those things another time.
