"Time passes. It does. The fog....lifts....unbelievably. And when it did, I found that I needed to redefine myself. Or at least, to try to remember who I had been and who I would be from now on".2015 was a strange old year for me, it wasn't one of my best times,... Challenging, stressful, bewildering & at times, it all felt a little bit hopeless & overwhelming.It wasn't an unhappy year but it had more than its share of sadness.
If there are "years that ask questions and years that answer", then 2015 was definitely the former.
And so, in the way that downs are, at some point, followed by ups, I am determined that 2016 will be A Very Good Year, a year that answers & a year to move forward.
It's taken me most of January to figure a few things out, to plan, to plot, to leap....
I feel as though I've emerged from something & I now have a much stronger sense of what to do, where to go & what to be....I have plans.
, Perhaps not surprisingly given my love of reading, a couple of books that I've read recently have been instrumental in the gradual change in my mindset.
I've started reading regularly again & one of my January reads was "Tolstoy and the Purple Chair - My Year of Magical Reading"....following the death of her sister several years before, the author decides that instead of charging at life, trying to be everything & everybody in order to deal with her grief, what she will actually do is read one book a year for a whole year.
Reading has always been a refuge & a happy place for her & during this year, she finds solace, joy & healing....."my year....allowed me to redefine what is important for me and what can be left behind".
I really identified connected with something in this book, as I also did with "Goodbye to All That : Writers & Loving and Leaving New York", a collection of stories by writers who have loved, lived, left & in some cases returned to NYC....if you love NYC, you'll love this book.
What the book describes beautifully & what I connected with in particular is how parts of your life can be so right at one time, so much so that you can't imagine ever wanting them to change....and then one day you wake up, things have shifted somehow & you wonder what took you so long to move forward.
Funnily enough, I started both these books last year but never got round to finishing them, maybe the timing wasn't right....the quote at that the top of this post by Ann Hood, one of the writers in "Goodbye To All That....",
I love it because it encapsulates perfectly just how I'm feeling right now.
I'm out of the woods & into the sunlight.
2016, I am ready for you.
