works of wanderlust

Tag: december-ish

  • December-ish (but still November-ish)

    Every year I tend to get a bit sentimental and reflective when December rolls around.

    As I close in on the end of my second full year of this blog, I’m hoping to channel some of that sentimentality into some productive creative motivation here (and also in other online and offline spaces I’ve been inhabiting lately.)

    Following my strict-ish rule of trying to keep this blog as fuzzily attached to my real persona as possible, I won’t point you in the direction of those other creative pursuits, things like posting a daily watercolour painting, writing fiction every day in December, and taking one photo per day. But I can let you know that I’m opening up my creative floodgates here too, particularly so, and plan to relaunch my December-ish daily blogging effort once again and fill your December reading with some of that aforementioned sentimentality.

    Each day I’ll try to write and post a little something on this site based on the same prompts that I wrote to on the same day of the month as last December.

    And if you are clever, like I know you are, you can find when you click on an actual post (like this one and not just the front page or an archive list) on the side bar (or bottom if you read on a phone) there should be a little widget called “on this day” that points you at the post I wrote on the same date but in previous years. Handy right?

    It’s cold outside right now. I walked a couple city blocks outside this morning and the wind was gusting and biting a raw cold that is hard to explain unless you’ve felt it. Walking in minus twenty five degrees Celsius is like touching a frying pan that has cooled enough not too burn yet is still far too hot to hold… that, but with cold. And with your face.

    It’s a good kind of weather to sit inside and dream of warmer days and write.

    So, stay tuned. Here comes December. Ish.

  • Better

    One word that sums up your theme for 2022

    Better.

    Just… better.

    Better days.

    Better minutes.

    Better hopes.

    Better self.

    Better efforts.

    Better me.

    Better you.

    Better world.

    Better everything.

    Better.

    Happy New Year!

    See you in 2022.

  • Groundhog

    One of my favourite films stars Bill Murray as a weatherman who, while visiting a small town to report on the festivities taking place to celebrate groundhog day finds himself trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of reliving the same day over and over and over again. He wakes up on the second of February countless times, makes his way through the day working out the various consequences of his small choices, and no matter how that version of the day ends he wakes up once more on the same day to restart exactly where he began.

    Groundhog Day, the day, has long been a kind of pseudoscientific celebration where we turn to nature (in the form of a large rodent’s reaction to it’s shadow) as a prediction of the remaining duration of winter weather.

    Thanks to the film, Groundhog Day has become shorthand for being stuck in a time loop and being forced to relive what is seemingly the same day over and over and over again as if the universe is testing one’s resolve to find a way to escape and that escape can only come at the cost of self-actualization and some kind of genuine epiphany of the soul.

    One word that sums up your
    theme for 2021.

    grownd - hahg

    A groundhog, also known around the world as a woodchuck, is a large rodent who obliviously predicts each year with stunning fifty-fifty accuracy the fate of spring at the hands of fading winter.

    I don’t yet know if 2022 will lead to an escape from the endless cycle of seemingly living the same day over and over and over again, but throughout the last three hundred and sixty-odd day, saying that it feels like groundhog day has become our go-to tongue-in-cheek analysis and recurring theme of our feelings of 2021.

  • Mask Up

    One quote that sums up your 2021 is…

    “Masks on at all indoor locations.”

    everyone

  • Perspective is Everything

    As another year comes to an end (in the next few days) it’s hard to remember that just one year ago we were looking with all the hope in the world at 2021 as it approached and left behind a monumentally bad 2020 somewhere in the past.

    This year hasn’t quite been the surprise gut punch that 2020 had been, but those second, third and fourth punches tend to hurt just as much as that first one, even if you start to get used to them after a while.

    Certainly it wasn’ that bad, you say.

    No. Certainly not. Certainly it could have been worse.

    What is one thing you’d like your kid to know about the year 2021?

    In fact, I’ve had plenty of reason to look at the world from a different perspective this past year.

    That old life, the one we had pre-pandemic, was still pretty much hanging on by a thread back at the start of this year. I don’t write about a lot of these things, but between work, home, self, and family a lot has changed since we hung that old calendar up on the wall twelve months ago.

    So, really, my perspective has really changed… even though I’m still sitting in that same desk looking at the same screen day after day.

    Pespective. It’s something a lot of us have gained this year.

    Putting things into a new perspective is not an easy thing to do, and sometimes it takes a jostle to one’s life to make that shift. Travel does wonders for giving us perspective. New experiences, new sights, new foods, new cultures. Waking up in a different climate or time zone, with the sun shining through a different set of blinds shakes us out of our routine.

    Or, one can live through a disaster, one of nature or of health or of countless other dark horsemen. That’s something a lot of us tried this year, and it shook us all out of our routines.

    What did that teach us?

    I’m sure it taught us lots of different things, each individually something unique and personal… but I’d be willing to bet that all of us have learned a little about perspective in the last year.

    Not every year is going to be this way.

    But that was 2021.