New Year Ideas

Image by engin akyurt

Everyone I have talked with cannot believe that yet another year has finished. Three years of pandemic living. Three years of not knowing. Three years of restricted ways of being for many of us. But also three years of reflective time, meditation, yoga, of deep conversations, both with self and with others. Three years of bush walking, cooking, gardening, reading, writing, playing and so the list goes on. For all of us. To flourish can be seen as a choice, except in times of enormous hardship. It is impossible to look away from the traumas that are happening around the world. To ignore the wars, the illness, the economy, racism, prejudice, poverty, climate change…well we just can’t afford to. So the question for me always comes back to what can I do about it.

Plenty. We can do plenty. I remind myself of the butterfly.

“They say that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian rain forest, it can change the weather half a world away. Chaos theory. What it means is that everything that happens in this moment is an accumulation of everything that’s come before it. Every breath. Every thought. There is no innocent action. Some actions end up having the force of a tempest. Their impact cannot be missed. Others are the blink of an eye. Passing by unnoticed. Perhaps only God knows which is which.

All I know today is that you can think that what you’ve done is only the flap of a butterfly wing, when it’s really a thunderclap. And both can result in a hurricane.”

― Catherine McKenzie, Fractured

There is no innocent action. And that is something to remind ourselves of every single day. What am I thinking today, actioning today, dreaming of today that will make our world a better place?

Happy New Year!