a letter of anticipation for the curious year ahead...

We are woven through our attempts to create ourselves; threads of different places, people, ideas, beliefs. All of these things slowly add liquid to our otherwise dry existence. Just like water is needed for clay, exploration is needed for our spirit and heart.

We will never “find” ourselves, for what is there to find? There is not another part of me waiting, somewhere out in the world, for this me to find it.

No.

We create ourselves, who we are going to be. Each year allows us a year of necessary growth, of necessary pain. 3-6-5 days to explore the world and our place in it.

People think our lives are suppose to reflect the search for a lost city in some far off corner of the world.

I think our lives are much much more than that. We get to build that city, construct its architecture and create its beauty. To place value in things and importance on ideals.

Who wants to spend their life searching for something that is already within them?

/The list of resolutions rages on for forever, attempted but never succeeded at./

There is one simple resolution, however, that we should all write down on our list. One that should follow us for the extent of our lives.

And this is the simple and most important truth.

We should all strive to explore this beautiful world around us. It is breathing full of life, full of excitement, challenges, and adventure. Only by acknowledging our minute presence and great importance in this world can we ever hope to make a change in it, an impact.

The world is too magnificent to only see it through one lense. To understand its full beauty, we must be willing to grow, to stretch.

But, we must have roots, deep roots; roots reaching that undercurrent of water; that substance of life.

And to have a thirst to be curious, to wander more.

There is so much beauty that is unseen, unnoticed.

"We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

-"Ulysses", Alfred Lord Tennyson