a new year

It’s a new year. A review of the past and a look into the future.

Things I want to explore in 2025

  • Write more on this blog to:
    • Think through things myself
    • As a creative outlet
    • To document for future me
    • To practice programming
  • Get back into Rock climbing. I had such a great time when I used to climb a few years ago, but unfortunately I let that slip away
  • Write more fiction and poetry. When I look at all my favourite people, they all seem to be authors.
  • Work on this secret business/programming project and launch asap.
  • Regular zazen/meditation/meetup groups. There is a community of people who are into Sam Harriss, and so far I’ve met some great people
  • Structured guítar sessions at an intermediate level
  • Take more photos. I regret selling my Ricoh GRiii, I think I need to rebuy it.
  • Training Goals
    • Injury prevention
    • Stretch more
    • Maintain muscle mass (3x a week)
    • Skill goals : Handstand pushup
  • More esoteric/obscure/random
    • Get deeply comfortable talking to anyone/strangers
    • Dress better
    • Look for beauty in every encounter
    • Memorise poetry (I’ve started with ‘Everything is waiting for you’ by David Whyte and ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver)
    • Create for the sake of creating

The past

The largest change in this past year at a personal level has been going through the end of a relationship. How do ‘I deal with the transience of all relationships in my life?’ I think.

Not just romantic, but friendships that have fallen away or changed. Relationships with my family that have evolved and changed. Grief at the loss of my mother, still the waves come, but less frequently and more lightly.

How do I not grip so tightly?

Over the past decade, it’s more clear that it’s not an intellectual answer, it’s an embodied one. And it’s not a fixed answer, it’s a dance.

I think of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye :

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

I remember I went to a day-retreat in the middle of London with Henry Shukman, and he was talking about heartbreak. The line he used stuck with me ‘The good thing about heartbreak is that when the heart breaks, it usually breaks open’.

The more I loosen the grip, the more the boundaries between the world and the self dissolve. I love things more.

I love art more, because it allows us to access places we wouldn’t normally be able to.

I love laughter more, because it’s the only sane response to the situation.

I love people more, because I know that I am in them, and they are in me. I love fiction because it allows me to live a thousand different lives, and feel the suffering and joys that go with it.

I love creation, because you sublimate yourself, momentarily absorbed into the process, marking the universe with your own unique fingerprints.

I love using the word love, because I know that I wouldn’t have 10 years ago. I love metaphors and similes because it’s like blending words together, the ellipses and ovals slowly becoming deformed, melting into each other to say things they could never have done alone.

I love walking in silence, allowing the world to reveal deeper, more gentle dimensions of itself.

I love doing hard things, because it feels good. I love moving my body, because the world moves with it.

I love saying non-sensical things, because we shouldn’t take words so seriously. But at the same time, we should. I love paradox, because it exists.

I love the passage of time. Time is not slipping through our fingers, it is we who are slipping through time.

I love meeting new people, because it’s like opening a new book and discovering that this moment is now etched into both your stories.

I love dogs, because they’re the golden ideal of how we should love.

And a million more things.

It’s hard to put into words the shifts in my internal state over the past decade, but meditation has fundamentally altered something. I wish I could say I don’t get impatient with my Father or that I never feel alone, but those things are no longer problems.

I’m reminded that self knowledge is not an end, it’s a process. Being in a relationship, you learn a lot about yourself. I hope that I can become kinder over the years to the people around me.