29 April 2016

The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.  ~Pablo Picasso

A year ago when I set an intention to explore life satisfaction in 2 posts a week for a year, I didn’t know whether I could achieve this goal.   That uncertainty stuck with me through most of the year.  I’m pretty dang delighted to have accomplished this!

I want  each of you to know that you have helped me get to this post 52 weeks later.  I am deeply appreciative and grateful for your presence here.  Every one of you has supported and added to this blog with your caring, your comments, your knowing.  I have carried you with me, tucked into my heart, appreciating the time, and sometimes the courage, it has taken to tap in here and read.

At this, the last official post of the adventure, I’m not sure what, if anything, is next in this space.  I have gained so much from writing here and being a part of this connection that I would like that to continue in some way but am unclear on a forward path.  Perhaps it could be picking a topic to explore for a month with one or two posts.  Or not.  So, I’m going to let ideas percolate.  Whether or not I pick the posting back up, this website will remain here, open and available, at least through next March.

I’ve learned a great deal in this practice of letting life guide me to topics, puzzling thoughts into words, letting new threads of understanding weave new cloth in my mind and my actions.  I have not arrived at any one place that feels final or comprehensive.  At one point in my life I would have wanted that.  Now, I’m fully accepting life as a process of ongoing change and unfurling opportunity.

Authors are occasionally asked if it was all worth it.  Sometimes they answer that if their book changes one life every minute of effort and hair-pulling was well rewarded.  In one such conversation I heard, the interviewer asked what if the one person that was changed was the author herself?  Was that still worth it?  At the time I heard this, that question stopped me and made me uneasy.  I wanted and needed there to be bigger gains.  But now, I am comfortable with a ‘yes’ answer to that question.

Because one of the things that’s come very strongly out of this year is recognizing that there is value in doing the thing that may only change our one individual life.  There is importance in honoring the creative urges and the yearnings to explore that may only serve us, may only enhance our personal experience.  I believe this is part of bringing ourselves to life wholly, with the vulnerability of not knowing how things will turn out but yet showing up and celebrating the fact that we matter.  The fact that we each dance our one precious life.

I encourage each of you to listen in to what calls you, what you would like to try or discover but that you might turn from thinking someone else would deem it silly or unimportant.  Do those things!  Open the gift of your life.  It belongs to you.

My great thanks and love and best wishes to all of you.  May you engage with life in a way that pleases and satisfies you.