looking ahead into 2022
The introspection continues, and this is very much an introspective moment. There is a large part of me that finds this passage from one (Gregorian) year to another an arbitrary marker in time, with no external marker separating days from days, weeks from weeks, months from months.
But given our calendars and our jobs, this also marks a pause for some of us. Email falls quiet. Offices close. I recognize that this doesn’t hold for everyone, but I’ll also admit that it’s a pause I’ve been looking forward to for a while now.
And in this pause from the day job, my mind turns to the near infinite collection of projects and the current plans for 2022.
An old project, one that’s been on the list for a long time now, is to go through all of these posts from the beginning, remind myself of what I’ve written and the themes that run through these posts. I’ve been doing this piecemeal in places, but not consistently, and I have to admit, I’m curious about the threads in this labyrinth I laid down but never followed.
I’ve been reminding myself of old math questions, scribbled in long ago filled notebooks and filed on shelves. Some of them I suspect have been solved by others, given how long ago I wrote them down, but there are still some with life in them. All they need is the slow steady rain of attention, and I hope to be able to give them that attention, that rain come the spring.
For a while now, I’ve kept a file, bits and scraps, single lines, scenes that were not yet stories. I made the mistake of printing that file out, and it runs to a lot of pages. And so one part of the plan is to carve out some time to go through and just what I have stashed away in there, and how much of it might be salvageable.
And this I think is the only real plan I can have for the next few months, moving into 2022. We don’t know what the world holds for us, but the world abides. I have my list, and some of it I’ll get done, some I won’t, but that’s just the same as it’s always been.
And this is part of the lesson. We’ve all been through something exceptional in its difficulty, extraordinary in its breadth, almost unimaginable from our world of a couple of years ago. And yet, our plans persist. Our hopes and plans for the future persist. And we nurture these hopes and plans as we go through our days.
multijimbo 