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This is the challenge we’re wrestling with. All of us.

How much can we really handle?

And, while it’s different for everyone, make sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew.

When we fill our schedules with constant activity and “productive” tasks, we might actually be ducking the harder work of introspection, meaningful relationships, or tackling our most challenging and important goals.

In this way, staying busy can become a comfortable hiding place – avoiding what we should be focusing on.

Mono no aware (物の哀れ) is a Japanese aesthetic concept that captures the gentle sadness or wistfulness felt when encountering the ephemeral nature of life and beauty.

The term, which literally translates to “the pathos of things,” is particularly evident in Japanese art and literature, such as in the falling of cherry blossoms or the changing of seasons, where the awareness of impermanence heightens rather than diminishes the appreciation of beauty.

Being mindful of the impermanent opens us up to the beauty around us.

Knowing. A possession of facts or understanding.

So perhaps they knowledge and understanding are positioned differently.

Understanding, then, may be a basis of knowledge.

But not the whole thing.

Understanding may be that which leads to knowledge.

There will be a time when you can no longer deal with certain things.

At that time, depedning on the situation, let it go

We use this too often in relationships, and too little in the rest of our lives.

Try to maintain your relationships, and try not to worry too much about less important things.

Thinking about yesterday, some of the postives centered around work.

Last year was one of the most personally creative years I’ve had, at least in quite some time.

Of my own projects, no less than half a dozen made progress.

That’s something. And it’s the basis from which can build on.

Trying to look at the year objectively can be a bit of achallenge.

There’s a lot of good that happened this year, a little bad, and mostly the rest fell in between.

How is that different from any one else, or any other year for that matter?

It’s been several years since I’ve set resolutions. I don’t know when I did last.

I think I supplanted them with word choices. 

This is a practice I picked up from a podcast in (or around) 2015. And while I’m not always consistent, I do believe I think on them at the changing of the year.

As for this year, my chosen word is emergence, and it is something that I hope to carry with me each day.

The first of January is a natural first stepping stone. It is a beginning. 

What you do here, now, on this day. That can set the course for your entire year.

It isn’t that this day is any different than any other day. But in our minds, we easily view it as the gateway to a new year. 

Make use of it. If you’d like.

I had a thought recently that prose is from the head, while poetry is from the heart.

Robert Frost said:

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words”

And I think that about sums it up…