Opening into the New Year
BY REIKA IWAMI
The New Year is looming, looking to ignite us all into the quest for new beginnings. Its message is enticing but unless we create space in our lives, how can we make room for and welcome the new? Perhaps that’s why so many of us fall by the wayside in the quest to keep those resolutions? Perhaps we just don’t make the time to look at our lives in the first place!
What does making space entail though? It means looking at the current parts of life that fill it up and make it what it is. Perhaps those fillers are perfectly good for us at this point of time or perhaps they aren’t? What we need first to do then is to make time and energy to look through our files of our life fillers and see what do we want to keep and what should or could be discarded? It seems in the downtime afforded by the holiday season and often its lack of routine is the universe offering us an opportunity to seek it out, ponder and consider where we are going next.
All, of course, are personal choices without rules to guide us except our own innate intuition and the associated body feelings that particular choices bring. I’ve learned to appreciate the physical reactions my body gives me and to trust that it knows what is best for me. If it wasn’t for that pesky voice in my head, doubting my abilities, suggesting possible negative scenarios that may arise, I’d be doing it easy.
But that’s what life is like, a series of choices that are not always easy or obvious and opportunities to be brave, that we either accept or not but always that bring consequences nor matter what our choice.
What we choose will sometimes be problematic, no matter how strong our allegiance to our intuition is. But that’s okay too! A life full of only success and happiness is not a life well lived in all the rich degrees of humanity. A life without challenges offers few opportunities for growth and to learn our lessons.
These are issues of being a human being encompassing the whole spectrum of life. New Year is an opportunity to examine where we sit, what we want to change, what we want to retain. Whatever our choices though, life embraces us as humans and we find more contentment if we believe that whatever happens, it will be okay in the end.
Perhaps it’s a philosophy you may feel can be passed onto the children in your lives not only through your example but by discussion. Seek out ways!
BY REIKA IWAMI - NEW MOON AND SEA - C
