A reflection on the New Year and a spiritual inventory.
After the night’s celebrations, I often find the most nourishing activity for the beginning of the year to be a few hours of reflection. What’s been accomplished? What goals have been met? Taking stock and inventory of one’s life at regular intervals is always wise, but often in the flurry of activity around the uphill holiday climb from October to December, people lose sight of themselves. I know I do.
So I made a list.
2011 was a year of change, and much of it came forcibly - the result of a bad situation or - more recently - at the untimely toll of my anxiety issues. But rather than focusing on the glaring problems that were unearthed in the past, I tried to memorize the happy and exciting events that marked a transitional period in my young adulthood.
For example, I turned twenty in March - my first moment out of my teenage years. Sometime before that I made a really, really cheesy video (kicking myself for this one). In April I met up with some new and old friends at a festival called Holi (not massively influential, I suppose, but a blast nonetheless) and attended mosque for the first time. By the end of the semester, I’d been accepted into the English Honors Program and finished my second year of college - which, remarkably enough, also marked my halfway point in my undergraduate education. I’d also began the closing process for moving into my very first house.
Over the summer, I finished moving in - and subsequently said goodbye to apartment life in downtown Austin, including my roommate of two years. I attended my first yoga class. I made a lot of food: homemade peanut butter, breads, muffins, hummus. This was probably the result of my quitting my first (and second) job at the veterinary clinic; instead, I got an internship with the Artists’ Rights Movement. I spent a lot of time in coffee shops.
August brought the promise of my third year of college. Suddenly everything got busy, and the subsequent months and their events flew by: Austin City Limits, Phi Sigma Pi events (and work as an officer), my Honors class, parties, a nose piercing, projects - and somewhere in there, I got a job at the Daily Texan, our University paper.
And for all the the high points, there were low moments, too. Cameron and I broke up and reconciled. My roommate and I stopped being close - as did many of my other friends from high school. And finally, perhaps the biggest whammy of them all, 2011 was the year I’ll always remember as the chronicle of me falling completely apart. Funnily enough, my grades and outward appearance seemed to reflect a person who was doing just fine - I made a 4.0 GPA for this past semester. I made and cultivated so many friendships - ones that I’ll treasure for years to come. But I’m in therapy. And I’m learning how to peer out from underneath this raincloud that floated over me somewhere last year.
But that last bit - the looking for the light - I think that’s the important part, the part to reflect on. Because it’s marking an improvement and a belief that things will not only get better, but that I deserve that chance.
And that’s something to celebrate.
So, as I take stock in my own spiritual inventory after revisiting the main events in my life this past year, I hope I can inspire you to do the same. Sometimes reacquainting oneself with the past serves as a gentle encouragement to keep forging on.
And that, my friends, is something to look forward to.
