The Myth of the Breeze

Ring in the New

I am writ­ing a per­sonal state­ment. Didn’t I just do this? Not two years ago, I wrote a per­sonal state­ment to fina­gle my way into grad­u­ate school. Well, I’m doing it again–this time for a short and inten­sive doc­u­men­tary writ­ing pro­gram in the cold cold land of Port­land, Maine. Writ­ing a per­sonal state­ment largely means I can not ignore the gram­mat­i­cal rules of the eng­lish lan­guage as I gen­er­ally choose to do. Of course, it doesn’t mean just that. It means sort­ing through the poorly orga­nized files in my head to pull out those juicy nuggets of mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ence. After sev­eral writ­ing ses­sions, I’ve real­ized that the major­ity of the expe­ri­ences I’ve dis­cussed have hap­pened in the past year.

I have tried to sit at this com­puter many times over the past week to gen­er­ate a blog post about the past year. When the new year comes around I find the press­ing need to sum­ma­rize, con­clude, and estab­lish my next steps. But I am feel­ing over­whelmed with pos­si­bil­i­ties. A new year is an excel­lent way to cel­e­brate the pas­sage of time, to divide a life into man­age­ably sized pieces. The end of a grad­u­ate pro­gram, how­ever, pro­vides the same feel­ing of “what is that open abyss I see out there and how can I pos­si­bly approach it?” as over­came me fol­low­ing my undergrad.

And so, I find myself so focused on for­ward momen­tum that I am unable to suc­cinctly clas­sify the year past. My per­sonal state­ment requires it, but as far as this blog is con­cerned, to hell with it. 2008 hap­pened and it was pretty cool.

I have been rack­ing up the res­o­lu­tions and have yet to write any of them down. So, here is a list. Carved into the stone tablets of the interweb.

1. write for 30 min­utes at least 5 days a week.

2. find the patience

3. honor the sab­bath (seri­ously, I’m sick of work­ing 7 days a week)

4. stay open to the pos­si­bil­ity of it

5. run a 10k.