or how a computer became temporarily allergic to power
to teach me the lesson of surrender
Postcardia #1 2015 (c) Jodi Cleghorn
It began New Years Eve (or maybe it began the day before?), the round-ups of 2014 of those close to me.
Even though my year doesn’t begin until February 19th (with the Chinese New Year) I decided I would write something. I wanted to be like everyone else. Surely there was a way to emulate what everyone else was doing? I’d just need to create a division between my life in general and the life I lead as a creative so as to leave something to write about when my creative year ended.
In my gut I knew it was not just an artificial delineation but a falsehood, to cleave one from the other. But you know, I wanted to be part of what was going on.
Then party preparation for NYE happened and amid them, I ploughed through the different storms of thought, trying to make sense of them. I didn’t make much progress, but glasses were washed, food was prepared and come later on NYE my guests were gastronomically sated and suitably cooled by a night dip.
There was always ‘tomorrow’.
TOMORROW, WHEN THE YEAR BEGAN
Tomorrow is an ephemeral concept at the turning of the year because it is my thing to stay up to see the dawn, take my first swim for the year and then collapse in bed. So after a five-hour kip, I decided to sit down and write.
The computer was flat though, and refused to charge. This continued, not just for a few hours, but several days.
What the hell? I just wanted to bloody write my round up. Why was the Universe pitched against me.
Why? Because I wasn’t being true to my path and sometimes it takes a computer’s stubborn idiosyncrasies to help you see the light.
LET GO, AND EVOLVE
Mystic Medusa has this phrase: evolve or evaporate. It’s what I was trying to hang my blog post on. I could clearly see how 2014 was a bastardisation of her maxim: evolve or disintegrate. Or evolve or dissolve (which perhaps fitted better the extreme feelings I had of obscurity, imprisonment and invisibility. Of having lost everything I wanted. Of the pointless of the future).
When I used it as a starting point in my journal yesterday morning, I fell down a pretty amazing rabbit hole and unearthed insights I would never have found writing a blog post.
2014 was a lesson in surrender — in finally letting go even though it was easier to hold on, even though holding on made life harder and harsher. Fed my depression.
Holding on was a habit; a love song to the past I still desperately wanted to sing.
And it wasn’t just one lesson, but a raft of them.
With surrender came trust, and with trust, came more surrender. With surrender the world rediscovered its axis and me. With surrender the freedom I thought I’d lost came back, not in the way I wanted, but in the way I needed.
BETWIXT TWO YEARS
With this new perspective, I can let go of 2014. It feels ‘right’. It feels okay.
Now, I can relish the space between years where new, small projects can blossom in the first glow of a new year and old projects, on the cusp of competition, can benefit from the burst of energy. And later, in February, there will be time to take stock of what actually happened. For now…it’s enough to have grokked the heart of the year that was.
There is no better news than the news that finds its way to you about making a yearly ‘best of’ list (or one of the many different iterations of the ‘best of’). I’m lucky enough to find myself on the ‘most read’ list over at Writers Bloc with my article “A Practical Guide To Beta Reading”. It’s a double victory because it was one hell of a difficult article to write and was the culmination of a number of ideas I’d had for a long time. To know it hit a chord with lots of readers is quite a nice feeling.
Pursuing Parallels 