January 16, 2024
From Resolutions to Creating
By Amba Gale
While many people are talking about making New Year’s resolutions these days, I want to want to approach that conversation from a deeper perspective.
While I don’t know about you, for me this is a time to stop, and to re-imagine and then design my life, and all the possibilities in it, and the possibilities I don’t as yet see, in behalf of co-creating with the world, a vibrant, totally extraordinary, meaningful, awake, inspiring, and enlivening future.
I want to call this moment “a time for creation,” a time for cultivating what the Zen folks call “beginner’s mind,” as the foundational and critical necessity for meeting this moment. To lean out over the edge of what we already know, what we already think, what we believe, and to be present, and still, in such a way that we can hear the future that is calling.
There is a new energy available to us. Can you feel it? It has just begun.
And, at the same time, to enter, to let that energy inspire us, to cross the threshold from where we have been living our lives, to CREATING a new start, takes something. It takes embracing endings, if not causing them. It takes stopping. It takes noticing our automatic resistance to change, if not letting go of it. Once you notice it, you can let go.
Here is how I express the passage I’m pointing to in my book, Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections. These are the first three paragraphs of the introduction to that book. May they bring you to a new place of thinking.
“We human beings seem to have an addiction to certainty, to stay with what is familiar because it is safe, with what is predictable, controllable, certain. We are resistant to change, and yet, sometimes in life, we come to those special times of threshold crossings in which accepting a change of what is occurring externally while crossing inside a threshold within is just what is called for.
Perhaps it is a crossing to another way of being, or another way of knowing, or another way of relating. Perhaps it is, simply, a “letting go”—a letting go of a certain way of life that is changing its form, or someone or something dear to us is leaving, or we are leaving them, or a letting go of a way of being, a letting go of something that once worked for us but now no longer does.
Our lives are not really one continuum if we truly examine ourselves and notice our development, but ongoing small deaths and rebirths if we are, indeed, committed to growing. Who we were in one iteration of our lives is not the same in the next. Once we cross that threshold into our next new life, we see the world with new eyes. And new perception means new possibilities, new horizons, new opportunities, new presence, and new futures.”
I invite you to PAUSE for a few (or more) moments, and perhaps reflect upon, and maybe journal about—
What is it time for me to let go of?
What is it time for me to say good bye to?
What is the “iteration of my life” that is at an end?
Is it a way of life? A particular belief? Some assumptions I have been holding? Some resentments I have been harboring?
For whom and for what am I grateful?
What are the gifts (sometimes masquerading as obstacles) that have been given to me and contributed to my evolution as a human being?
Who and what Do I appreciate? When will I express that appreciation?
