Hopefully everyone had a great holiday–I hope you were able to spend at home, with family and friends, and a cup of good cheer and merriment; or tucked away in a closet by yourself crying at the plight of active management and being yet another year closer to the unending dirt nap. I know I spent a good chunk of my time off engaging in behaviors that I should avoid: watching endless amounts of television, housing boxes of cookies, sleeping late, daily Irish coffee(s), realizing that I’m still in pajama pants at dinner……it was gluttony for the ages.
EITHER WAY, it’s time to shake off the cobwebs and get back to business. And that business, is a new you!
It’s 2018….it’s going to be your best year yet.
Time to find that gym membership card (or at least remember how to get back to the gym), swear off all alcohol for a month, start praying, write in that journal, throw out the junk food, start your daily routine of meditation, yoga, hot yoga, hot stone yoga, pilates, and hot pilates. Time to stop threatening to chain your kids up in the freezing shed whenever they mouth off…….whatever you think is going to make you a better person (but it’s really not). Because the fact of the matter is….you’re still you.
And let’s face it…all of those problems and issues you didn’t solve in 2017 are still there. That’s why you’ve made new year’s RE-solutions. You’re going back to try and RE-solve the same old stupid problems. You keep tryin’ to fix what ails ya.
I have a different idea (courtesy, of course, of CBS Sunday Morning).
Consider two different forms of art:
One is “pentimento,” which is an example of a type of art by the artist Henri Matisse. In many of Matisse’s works, if you look close enough, you’ll see that the final piece was not a singular drawing, but in fact, a dark “finished product” that had been sketched over and over on top of each other. Matisse would not entirely erase the scribbles or the versions he didn’t like. The blemishes and do-overs are right there in the gallery along with the final sketch.
“This is called pentimento, which is Italian for “repent” — to regret, to change your mind. Matisse, a master, left his stumbles for us to see, and the ghosts of his mistakes inspire us to strive not for perfection, but for creation.”
The other notion is “kintsugi,” which is the Japanese method of repairing broken ceramics with gold. The idea is that the cracks of something are part of its history and should be kept visible, even shiny. It’s the art of embracing damage while making something whole. An object becomes more beautiful because of its flaws. (This is now a phrase I will utilize with my wife and family until the day I die.)
Let all of your crappy days and unfulfilled dreams and unmet goals of 2017 be the sketch upon which you draw over. Let it be the cracks that you ultimately fill with gold.
It’s 2018.
It’s not a new you. It’s a different you.
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