I’d bet that a lot of us get blue or depressed as the year comes to a close. I know I do.
The closing of the year always makes me acutely aware of everything I haven’t lived up to — the projects that I didn’t make happen, the money that I didn’t make, the people I didn’t go to visit, the travel that I didn’t do. Maybe it’s the gray days and the cold, but Yuletide Cheer might come more easily to me if it didn’t come at Yuletide.
So this article resonated a little extra — not only because so much of my platform and my thinking is built on the idea of breaking our accustomed paradigms, anticipating how the world is changing, etc., but also because I find the idea that we can begin again, no matter how long we’ve been doing it the old way….there’s a comfort in that for me. This year as much as most, I need that encouragement. I need to do a hard reset.
This part really struck me. And encouraged me in ways I don’t fully understand.
The benefits of the beginner’s mind are well documented. The absence of expectation is a boon to the human experience, an open mind is key.
But aside from all that, being a perpetual beginner has other benefits as well. A life of learning keeps things fresh. The connections between disparate ideas and skills become apparent. And when a hopeful beginning ends in abject failure, as it did when I earned my motorcycle license, despite driving a scooter into a ditch, one not only learns about the benefits of failure, but that a whole new beginning lies in wait.
A whole new beginning lies in wait.
A whole new beginning lies in wait.
I am preparing to expand this Future Here Now platform for next year. I’m working on amping up the marketing, attaching this newsletter to other products and services, and re-creating this newsletter (again) to include more information, more practical advice on taking the abstract and putting it into action, and more.
But I’ve tried and failed before — on this, and on other things that I’ve tried to create. There’s always a nagging voice that says it’s not gonna work because That Thing didn’t work before. That what you’re trying to say, Della, is too weird, too abstract, too out there to something to …work as a product. To make money.
To matter.
So I want to thank you for reading, responding, commenting this year. There’s not a ton of you — I am not giving Heather Cox Richardon or Dan Rather a run for their Substack supremacy, that’s for sure — but…
You encourage me. Some of you are willing to spend a little money, to read what I write and get some value out of it. The side effect of that is that you are encouraging me. Thank you for doing that.
I got my first tattoo ever this year, at the hoary age of 53 (It was supposed to be for my 50th birthday, but a combination of pandemic and a massive, massive needle phobia slowed the train a loooot).
It’s a line of text from one of my favorite song, on the inside of my forearm, maybe a third of an inch tall. Really, really simple:
It’s time to begin.
It’s time to begin.
A whole new beginning lies in wait.
You have been receiving a late-week post subtitled Selections the past few weeks. Those selections are from previous writing I’ve done — from my books, blog posts, presentations, and so on. For the rest of December, I’ll be sharing some of my favorites with you - if you’ve seen one or a couple of them before, I hope you’ll still get some benefit from them, or at least some amusement.
I’m not taking December off - it’s more of a retooling period, like the auto plants I grew up with do when they shut down for a couple of weeks in the late summer to reset the assembly line equipment for the next year’s models. I’ll be using this time to finalize the new Future Here Now format, develop more of a backlog for those weeks when a one-woman shop isn’t at 100% capacity, and finalize and launch the new campaigns. That’s in addition to working on a big New Year campaign for Trep House, a bunch of tasks around refining Trep House’s machinery, singing in a fundraising concert on the 18th, singing Christmas services, obligatorily losing my voice (always happens), spending time with my sons and family, and (this being Cincinnati), hopefully not ending up under a 3-inch layer of ice.
So I wish you warmth, love, happiness and new beginnings.
And I’ll throw in some rock salt.
Best wishes for joyous holidays. See you in the New Year.
Della