2010s These are heady times...

It is the end of another Julian calendar year... it was the ending of the year for my own personal calendar year back in September. My decade also started earlier. I will explain more on this later, if I don't forget, or if I still feel inclined.

Hey! The year is ending! It's an exciting time, always has been for me. Mostly because symbolically the first of the year, any year has always suggested a clean slate, and a starting over. It's a hopeful time.

Still.

This is the first of many years where I feel and wish a continuation of things from previous days. I know I am going to look back on this time years from now and know beyond any doubt that, indeed, these next years are going to cement and guide my future years like nothing else in my life. A keystone is metaphorical in so many ways, and perfectly suited for what I am feeling.

Life is interesting. 2009, 2010, has been a tremendous time for me. I think life is interesting because for so many of us, when someone says that they are happy, giddy with excitement, bursting with love with light, and with good humor for their own lives and the world around them, people tend to either think that these people are deluded, misguided, or just brazenly lucky in life.

I am here to suggest that none of these things are true. I am here to suggest that YOU, and ONLY you can make the argument, (it is not an argument in any case), for your own happiness, your joy, your well being, your general mental homeostatis. You and no one else.

The corollary is just as true. Only YOU, yourself, by your own unwillingness and ignorance can make yourself miserable, cowardly, insecure, unconfident, unhappy... It is not in your cards that you were handed, nor in some silly astrological chart, not in the way your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, neighbor, teacher, boss, other human outside of your self treats you...

Your happiness or unhappiness has nothing to do with what is found in your back pocket, your bank account, your job, your lack of job, your love life, your lack of love life, how fat you are, how thin you are...

Your happiness/unhappiness have only to do with YOU and how you respond to life's monkey wrenches and curve balls. Only YOU.

"You are the author of your own health, of your disease."

If you don't like where your year has gone, your decade has gone, your entire life has gone, act NOW AND CHANGE YOUR OWN COURSE.

We are blessed with a wit of a clean slate, and this can happen, anytime! It doesn't have to be at the end of the Julian calendar.

My clean slate began in May 2008, and I haven't looked back since. It has been a heady whirlwind of a journey. I closed so many doors and brutally excavated memories buried deep within the crevases. I cleaned my house and cleared out. It was a heady time. Scary, but heady. And what ultimately started as a painful process quickly turned into something unbelievably exciting and then, every door, every window opened and continues to open...

Amazing!

People think I am lucky. People think I am happy because I have things come easily my way. But it has nothing to do at all with luck! When you start flowing with what your nature intended, you find yourself easily in tune with Nature with the capital 'n' and this is when things start to happen... Good things find you just as the "bad" once found you and followed you like a bad debt. It is such a simple and straightforward equation; and not at all complicated or esoteric.

Things do start to happen, believe me! Of course, not all things, are necessarily good, in the conventional sense. But you also start to notice the yucky things happen less and less, and when they do happen, your responses are also different. I met with a pretty serious accident earlier this year and totaled my brand new car. An industrial ladder was left in the highway, taking up two lanes, it was dark, rainy and the snow was just starting to clear, I saw it too late... Nothing bad happened to either me or the person driving the truck that I crashed into head on, and I now drive another new car,  but still, yucky business nevertheless. I escaped unscathed and did not shed a single tear. I have only to thank my vipassana and peaceful disposition for that serenity during that crazy car episode.

I am only using this example to illustrate that even when you start living a life connected to your inner chi and effortlessness, "bad" things can still happen. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The deer can still get eaten by the lion, but it still goes on, alert and active, not in the least bit sad, depressed, or angry, in the forests of the world...

Yet, still:

Life is so beautiful. In its entire capacity. If you want a good year, you have to make it happen! If you want love, you have to be that love! If you want whatever it is that you want, you have to make the effort, and also make it effortlessly! Ha! This is the koan of my life. Effortlessness...

I wish all of you much peace, love, joy, and happiness for this coming year. May you work hard, be ever mindful, always practice compassion, and share as much love that you can muster with the rest of the world.

A very happy New Year and Metta to all. May all beings be happy!