2017 is almost here! I've seen a lot of writer friends recently posting lists of their favorite articles they wrote, and I've personally fallen victim to a number of recent primo year-end Amazon Kindle deals. So I was thinking about how to wrap up 2016 for myself - the year has been terrible for so many, and except for a couple notable parts of my life, the jury is still mostly out on how 2016 has treated me.
However, today, as I clean and putter around my apartment, I've decided to try bullet journaling once again, or at least a minimal, deeply modified version of bullet-journaling (just give it a Google, if you don't know what I mean). One of my favorite things about this format is that it encourages me to write down quotes that strike me at the very moment that I find them, even if I'm not sure what they mean at the time. Even as I count four aborted attempts to bullet journal between August 2015 and now, each attempt has at least one quote noted in it. I'm sharing them here as my version of a yearly wrap-up, since there's probably no more accurate encapsulation of my year.
"The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds." - The Dalai Lama (found in a daily Zen calendar)
"Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating." - Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)
"She had been comfortable, and comfort is the death of the soul, which is by nature searching, insistent, unsatisfied. This dissatisfaction drives the soul to leave, to get lost, to be lost, to struggle and adapt. And adaptation is growth, and growth is life." - Dave Eggers (Heroes of the Frontier)
"I started, instead of trying to act like I knew what was going on, to write like I was a mess." - Mary Karr (on an On Being podcast episode)
Here's to 2017! May it be full of great reading, good writing, and much inspiration.