Extending my Year

December 2, 2021

I’m doing some committed procrastination today. There are things, maybe just one or two, that I need to do today, but since last month I’ve been wanting to ‘review’ the year. It’s something I often do at the end of each year and sometimes blog about it. Reading through those year-end posts is useful. 

 

I mean, I don’t know how many of you remember your ‘years’? Or even the earlier months of the current year? I don’t—and those posts have been a snapshot capturing the major energies of that year. 

 

This year I felt an urgency to review the year, and find something ‘useful’ in it, since November. I feel like l’ve drifted 2021 away and I needed to find solid markers that would  allow me to map it.

 

One of the things I need to do today is self-training and prep for my karate class tomorrow. The self-training often provides a blue-print for the lesson. I also need to start reading my re-drafted novel so I can start the revision. Will it be the last one? Maybe, as I have versions of it all over my laptop, and in clipped piles of paper on the bookshelf in my writing room. I want to expunge them all. 

 

Instead, I am doing other things. Like looking at my journals from the beginning of this year to see where I was at then. The days before I began that 27-day blog challenge in June seem erased. I also am looking for my journals from end 2013, when Sensei Pete left Singapore. I want to remember those first days in this journey of teaching. I want to drink tea, stare, reflect, assimilate. 

 

I took a quiz earlier. Are you a plotter or a panster? A plotter plots out the entire book before writing. A panster wings it daily, often having to delete large sections of work. I already know I am a panster. I would bore myself if I plotted things tightly. The quiz had questions about how organized one is on holiday or when going to a new place. I’ve changed. I used to have a solid itinerary for each holiday but in the last trips I’ve taken I’ve planned the next day only at dinner on the previous one. I discovered I am at the extreme end on the panster side of the scale. I used to love ‘pansting’ my karate but the pandemic rules forced more planning. Which am I then?

 

This made me want to organize some notebooks and I was shocked to find that since the pandemic began my notebooks have moved into chaos. I used to have a journal and two other notebooks, one for the novel(s) I was writing and the other for classes I took or craft books I read. They were organized chronologically, as in I finished one and started the next. Also, by color, size and type. Now there is no order. Several notebooks with similar content and overlapping time periods exist. Also, the black ones are now sometimes journals, and beige ones contain notes for other things, and I have them in different sizes than I used to. The urge is to ‘stop’ my world till I finish making sense of the notebooks, or alternately shred them all. I am that frustrated for that clueless about dealing with the disorder. 

 

I am desperately frightened to start reading this draft of my novel. What if it is crap? I had a goal of finishing the revision before the end of this year, but each time I pick up the papers to read I get a temple crushing headache that makes my sinuses ache. I need to explore this resistance, so I’ve decided to extend my finish date to CNY instead of the Gregorian new year. Gives me an extra month.

 

Meanwhile the spouse was home today, and we spontaneously began remembering scenes from my fantasy novel. I also remembered the first weeks of karate after Sensei left Singapore.

 

I might be wrong, but it feels like these two journeys may converge in some way over the next months, particularly if I pay attention to signals. I feel like I am discovering some lessons in both, that might help me reach another space, level, understanding with them. 

 

May it be true.