GOOD INTENTIONS

“You must do the one thing you think you cannot do.” Eleanor Roosevelt

At the moment, the one thing I think I cannot do is write this blog. What is holding me back? New Year’s resolutions. New Year’s blessings, prayers, videos and messages from all corners of the globe. By great writers and leaders, actors and teachers. Wisdom circulating through my email, my WhatsApp, in text trails and snail mail. Taunting me with wit and wisdom and techno-dexterity that date me back to the Stone Age. So I ask myself: “What can I possibly add to all that?” Better yet: “What can I subtract?”

Me. Myself. I.

Amazing, serendipitous, unbelievable things happen when I get out of my own way. For example, as of this moment, I don’t know what I’m next going to say. And that’s OK. Because something will bubble up from my subconscious that will guide my thoughts and writing. And, just in time, a quote accredited to Goethe floats into mind:

“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated, —
Begin it, and the work will be completed!”

That would be a good quote on which to end this posting, but, alas, I have more to say. As New Year’s resolutions go, beginning anything is a good way, indeed the only way, to make manifest the dreams that Goethe refers to. As for resolutions, a friend asked me on New Year’s Eve if I had made any for 2021. I said that I had not.

Yet.

In return, I asked what hers were.

“Just one”, she said: “Get. It. Done”.

And so, in the spirit of getting it done, on Friday, the first day of January, I am getting my weekly blog done for the seventh time in a row. And you will be the first hundred or so people to know that I intend to write one blog a week for the next twelve months. All of 2021. I’ve said it here. Now I’m committed. I have witnesses. I have friends who will say: “It’s Monday…”, with arched eyebrows and a challenging glint in their erstwhile non-judgmental eyes. I can’t face saying: “Sorry. Not today”.

But beyond wanting to save face, what is my motivation to keep blogging? It is to continue the meaningful dialogues that Thomas Merton claimed are “absolutely essential if one is to remain human”.

COVID has taken much from us. In the macrocosm it has taken lives and livelihoods, devastated industries and brought humanity to its knees. In the microcosm of my small life, it has snatched away blessings and joys that I had long taken for granted: “breaking bread” with friends and family. Shopping maskless-ly for groceries. Strolling, even lingering, in now-verboten public places.

It seems that a reasonable way to compensate for what COVID has taken away is to reach out via the very technology that first intimidated me, and which now allows me to participate in the great global information exchange. And, more importantly, it enables me to do what I set out to do. Continue the conversations I have had — or would like to have — face to face with many of you.

So in the spirit of carrying on where some of us left off, I share my New Year’s dream/wish/hope:

May we all find the fortitude to undertake – and in so doing complete – whatever it is we think we cannot do.

(And that you’ll let me know how it’s going.)