Tag Archives: New Years Day

Happy New Year, and a Personal Reflection at the Close of My Fourth Decade

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Signs on a post off Mountain View Road, rising out of the Anderson Valley, California

Today is the last day of 2016, and my last day in my 30’s.

It feels significant, somehow, turning 40.

Perhaps it’s because my love of history and my long background in collecting, buying and selling vintage goods. They’ve put me in the habit of organizing things into chunks of time: decades, centuries, eras. It’s a useful tool, even if a blunt one, since of course events and styles don’t come into and out of existence based on the turn of a calendar page. But the human mind looks for patterns existent in nature, which leads to the impulse to impose more precise ones on top of those, artificial even as they’re based on natural phenomenon. The calendar year traces the earth’s yearly rotation around the sun, and units of ten reflect the number of fingers we’ve used to count since our infancy.

As I enter my fifth decade of life, I’m looking forward to big changes. It’s been my habit generally to follow my whims, whatever sparked my interest and excited my imagination at the moment, wherever they’ve led, much as the Native Americans of the plains (which I’m reading about now) followed wherever the buffalo herds, fresh water, and new grasses led them. This free-spirit predisposition has given me a varied life, often an exciting one. But my tendency to take the short view has also hampered me in many ways, since pursuing a meaningful career, achieving larger goals, and making enough money to fund them usually demands strategic planning and sacrificing short term needs and desires. And the lack of long term strategy and planning has often severely frustrated my deeper desires for the former. Sometime luck smooths our way and facilitates our talents and passions, such as landing the right job, meeting the people who can help us, inheriting money or having the knack for making it, or hitting upon the right invention or idea which meets the need or captures the imagination of the public. But sometimes, we need to make our own luck in other ways.

I love what I do and pursue my interests as avidly as time allows, but I’ve found myself driven and bothered by a sense of ambition new to me. I suppose I’m one of those late bloomers, at least I hope so. I wish, no, need, to bloom. I’m not satisfied any longer cramming the pursuit of my deepest interests into the scraps of time left to me before and after the hours I’m busy making a living. Don’t get me wrong, I value what I do for a living: I believe I’ve done good, honest work, I’ve learned so much from my jobs, and I’m grateful for the opportunities. But I also believe I can accomplish some things more in line with my particular talents and passions if I impose more and much-needed discipline upon myself, and place myself in situations where I can meet others who share my passion for this kind of learning. I have so much learning to do, knowing only enough to realize I know so little.

So I’ve prepared for my return to academic studies and applied to many grad schools, casting my nets widely and ambitiously, waiting with baited breath to see what comes of it. My education is drawn out and rather piecemeal, but I’m hoping some great institution(s) of learning will do me the honor of finding my body of work, both academic and independent, compelling enough to place their faith in me. The last time I returned to university was one of the richest, most exciting, and most satisfying parts of my life, and I’m looking forward to my next immersion in learning with the greatest excitement.

In the meantime, I’m celebrating the turn of the year and of the next decade of my life quietly on a little camping trip, one of my favorite things to do. I’m feeling reflective so I’m not partying, which I’ve so enjoyed doing for past New Years’. I love carefree conversation, carousing a little, and dancing with my friends. But somehow, this feels like a different sort of occasion.

Happy New Year, my dear friends, family, and all of you who take an interest in my work. I thank you all sincerely, and with much love. I hope this year satisfies the deepest needs and desires of your minds and hearts.

~ Amy Cools

New Year’s Day, a Resolution, and Writing as ‘Stepping Back’

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For some reason, my eyes flew open a little before 8 am this morning, even though I didn’t go to bed ’til 2. I was at a house party with good friends, and spent a good deal of it by the fire pit in the backyard, and my hair smells deliciously like smoke. Bryan’s still sleeping, the house is quiet, and I’m here on the sofa with my coffee, obeying the first of my New Year’s resolutions on my list: to write at least 500 words a day.

I love the New Year holiday, and as I rediscovered when I returned to college a three (or so) years ago, I love writing. So this is an excellent way to start the year!

I feel that I can express myself so much better, sometimes, through writing, even better than with my artwork, and I’m always trying to find a way to communicate better with people. I’m a social person, who needs the feel the love and companionship of others in order to feel happy and satisfied. In fact, I’m very needy in this way. (Funnily enough, even more so than Bryan, who’s perfectly happy and comfortable spending a lot of time alone; he’s very self-possessed. But in social situations, Bryan’s the one who’s most at ease, who can find a way to connect with everyone, so funny and entertaining in conversation, and everyone loves him!) But I’m also very shy, and within the last couple of years, I’ve let many of the good habits I built up in my early 20’s fall away. When I was a child and into my teens, I was extremely shy and awkward, and had few friends, since the strange circumstances of my upbringing kept me somewhat isolated. But when I went to junior college, I enjoyed the company of so many new people and craved it constantly, so I learned how to be social and agreeable, mostly by listening and asking a lot of questions (this was not mere politeness, I was really interested! People are especially fascinating when you’ve spent most of your life rarely getting to know anyone outside of your own family). But in the last couple of years, I’ve become much more introverted in my habits, and have discovered, to my dismay, that there are so many people I care about that I haven’t really talked to at all, or in depth, in a long time. I even find myself retreating into myself when the people I actually want to talk to are right there in the room with me! That will change, I am determined.

So many of my introverted habits, I think, come from trying to figure out who I am and why, and how to be the kind of person I want to be, the kind of person worthy of respect, admiration even. I’ve been immersed in the past couple of years one of those existential crises that fall upon so many in their thirties, when one suddenly finds that they are well on their way through adulthood and there’s just not longer an ocean of time left. While these crises are inevitable and provide a valuable opportunity to take stock, it’s also important not to let them go on too long, since they can lead to that internal, doubt-driven wheel-spinning that impedes action. It’s a time to get it together and pick some goals to pursue and things to excel at, but then the time comes where you need to just get out there and actually do something about it.

Writing is an excellent tool to that end, and a way to really get to know one’s self, what one’s core values are, what are the best uses of one’s time and energy. It’s reflection and action all at once. I often feel that I really don’t know myself that well in many ways, and suspect that, through writing, I’ll be able to discover more. I think it’s often hard to understand oneself, to know certain things about one’s own personality and motivations, because it’s so hard to judge one’s own actions objectively, to see patterns in behavior, to get the ‘big picture’ view. One’s just just too close of an observer, too immersed in the instincts and emotions of the moment, to really ‘get’ why one’s doing, or thinking, or saying, whatever it is, at the time. I think writing is a process very like the ‘stepping back’ I do when creating an artwork or a piece of craft: I take a moment, or a few, to take some steps back from the work, to look at the overall effect, and to see how everything is hanging together, what needs to be changed, and what is working well.

When I write down what I’m thinking, I can get that big-picture view in a way that I rarely can otherwise, except perhaps in depthy conversation. Yet, writing is very like good, depthy conversation, because you’re calling on yourself to explain and describe something to an audience, and you’re conscious of other minds and how they may be perceiving what you have to say. And, you’re calling to mind the things other people have written or said concerning whatever it is you’re writing about. So writing also helps me to figure out what I really think and believe about things out there in the world.

That’s because, through writing, you can put together all those elements to craft a bigger picture, a more complete story, as opposed to just experiencing the daily stream of reactions to what’s going on out there. These reactions are important in themselves, the emotional responses, the internal arguments, the stockpiling of information about the world. But when you write, as when you converse, you’re putting it all together for yourself as well as for the person you’re talking to. What writing has over conversation is that you can go back and look over what you’re saying, and revise it, and perfect it much more thoroughly, and it’s not subject to lapses of memory. You become accountable to the ideas you expressed before, much like politicians are now accountable for those things they do and those words they spout off, since everything’s recorded these days. The more you write, and share what you write, you become more accountable to yourself, and to your readers. It places you firmly on a path of regular self-discipline, and self-improvement, as you strive to improve the quality and cohesiveness of your ideas. This ‘stepping-back’ process can do for your mind what it can do for the things you create: it shows you what’s missing, what you need to do in order to complete a more perfect, more beautiful, more unified whole.

So on this New Year’s morning, I affirm my resolution to be a better writer, and, through that, a better thinker and a better person. And I thank you, dear reader, for participating in this endeavor with me.