Hello and happy 2024 everyone.
I hope you’ve managed well through this very emotionally triggering time called the holiday/silly/festive/Christmas season. It runs roughly from a week or two before Christmas until mid January, this period where more people struggle with existential questions, grief and loneliness than most other times on the calendar.
Those struggles are concurrent with most support services shutting down over the break, some comforting routines being interrupted, and many who are usually present heading off, distracted by partying and travels.
What soothes?
If you’ve managed to cultivate some quiet passions, meaning you don’t need lots of other people or things around you to enjoy them, then this can be a brilliant time for complete immersion in your flow. Here’s something I prepared earlier…
You can find your flow most anywhere but it tends to be through the arts or sports and in doing rather than only spectating. It’s all about transcending emotion for a while by communing with a passionate interest. Ideally, it carries you off into your imagination, evokes contentment by engaging your intelligence.
For Me, it’s Writing
I’ve watched some stuff written by thriller writer Harlan Coben these holidays and I quite like his stuff. It’s very twisty and keeps you engaged, asking questions. So I decided to do his little primer course online for thriller writers. I enjoyed it (no kick backs to me here, I don’t do that crap).
It’s not an in-depth course, but you don’t always need that. Sometimes you just need those gems of inspiration and a few hard truths about how there are no shortcuts to doing your sport or art, your thing, you just have to do it because you love how you feel once you’re really in there doing it. In. Flow.
Harlan Coben’s advice for writing includes some quotes he subscribes to:
Voltaire’s Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good - Love it.
Or this interesting one - Elmore Leonard’s: I try to cut out all the parts you’d normally skip.
Interesting, right?
Perhaps the philosophy he shared that I liked most was to let everyday life be your source of ideas, research and inspiration, looking at everything as material for art. I’m aware of doing this already, but it feels so nice to be affirmed and understood. Seen and encouraged.
As I get older, one thing I know for sure is that daily life has within it, for every single one of us, a very big part of putting one foot in front of the other, metaphorically chopping wood and carrying water. Not all of life is enormously exciting or fancy, much of it is following whatever daily path keeps your body and mind well.
Then, inhabiting that well mind and body, we can pursue flow and passion and enjoy relationships with the people, animals, spirits and environment that we want to commune with.
Honestly, after much soul-searching, I think that’s all there is and it’s more than enough. May your 2024 be filed with daily food for flow and wellbeing, and all that enables you to enjoy.
Love to you,