Stepping into 2023

New Year's Eve inspiration for appreciation, letting go and creating the space for rewriting our stories.

Touching Liberation

When I was nine,
     my favorite navy and white polka dot train engineer hat
     was taken away by the “adults” in my life. 
     “It’s not ladylike” to wear to school, they scolded.
     Since school was what I loved most,
     I succumbed. 

When I was fifteen,
     I begged my dad to join him 
     on the opening day of elk season
     “Hunting is not for girls,” he told me.
     Then he walked into the woods like he always did,
      on my mid-October birthday. 

When I was eighteen
     my senior class award was not
     the prettiest, the sweetest, or the funniest.
     “Most Liberated Woman,” they labeled me under   
     my photo in the yearbook next to 
     “Most Chauvenistic Man.” 

At fifty-nine
     and still figuring out who I am
     I see where every label,
     every archetype,
     every box they tried to put me in
     didn’t fit 
     and I can almost touch that promised liberation. 

Should we even look back?
     Or just forward?
          Perhaps, I think, it’s best to just
	      stare at the snow
		falling gently.

As New Year’s Eve 2023 approaches, I find myself, as one does, excited by the promise of the turning of time and excitement for what the next year may hold. I gave up on New Year’s resolutions long ago but have clung to an intention suggested by a young sage during a New Year’s yoga class in 2020: 

“Imagine you are stepping into a white room. It’s bright and spotless, and free of clutter. You get to come in but can only bring what serves you. You can leave everything else behind. What will you choose to bring with you? What will you walk away from?”

This may sound familiar to those who have followed me for a while. I wrote about it in Step into the White Room and Leave That S#%^ Behind. I was moving into a new home then, and the essay focused on strategies for decluttering your life of all the material things that no longer serve you. Today I’m thinking about all the labels, archetypes, expectations, and regrets that no longer serve me and strategies to jettison them in 2023. 

What I am going to make room for is appreciation - self-appreciation, to be more specific. That this has been sorely missing has been pointed out often over the past couple of weeks. The seeds were planted when I treated myself to a sideral astrology reading and my mentor, the intuitive Lyn Dalebout, told me I needed to practice more self-love. “What does that even mean?” I wondered at the time. 

Shortly after Lyn’s reading, I took a much-needed break from Christmas wrapping, cooking, cleaning, and decorating. I was exhausted laying on my back, zoning out to a Chopra Meditation on “Appreciation.” I expected a reminder to express gratitude for all the good things in life, but the focus was instead on myself – not just celebrating those around me. 

As I contemplate full-time as a writer, a big part of that will be writing my story. Scary stuff. I’m realizing, though, that I can “re-write” my story. We all do. We can continue to accept what our parents, friends, culture, and, quite frankly, our egos have told us about who we are, or we can clear out that which no longer (or never did) serve us. 

That’s the fun of growing old; when the walls of time start closing in on you, you may not be able to climb over them anymore, but you can still push open the door, step outside, and close it gently behind you.  

Author Patricia Digh on the New Year: "At the end of each year, I ask myself two questions: 1) What do I want to create in this New Year? And, perhaps even more importantly, 2) What do I want to let go of?"

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