After surviving the seemingly endless vortex between the Christmas and the New Year's Eve, with a few extra kilos on the waistline, you caress your belly gently like it is your war scar, as if all that over indulgences were an aggressive attack on the regrets, pains and griefs of the deceased dreams of the passed year. You get out of that a different person, and you need a new blue plan. And here it is, right at your living room, buried between the pages and lines of old magazines, all you need are a pair of scissors and a glue roller.
For years I made my new year vision board with a group of friends, sometimes at the end of the year, sometimes the beginning. We dived into a pile of the old magazines and newspapers, outdated catalogs and flyers, and occasionally random printed images and texts. It always felt like an impossible task, how could we make those unrelated messy materials, to any degree of remotely coherent narrative, let alone to predict or at least serve a blue print for the coming year? Not to mention often we got into it completely blank without any forethought, just our old exhausted self after a year of hard work and at times, real struggles. It is hard to think about the next year, to make new plans, when you barely survived the old one.
But somehow, we always found something in that pile of random images and texts. I look back to my old vision boards often and have to say, it does predict 80% of my focus on that year. Last year I had this feeling that I would have a full on conflict with the shadow side of myself, all the fears and insecurity, I might lose my way, drift away from my path. I knew it was a part of the journey that I must overcome, and I thought I had seen what that was. But then something happened during the last moon of the year, hit me so hard and exposed just how vulnerable I still am. I gave it a good grief, I went really far in that dark sad place. Until I had had enough of that, I stood up and moved on.
With time our group dissolved and it's hard to gather to do this vision board together, but I am sure we will all find our own way in the pile of old magazines in front of us, in our own time and space. I did mine yesterday, at the very beginning of the year. I didn't know what I was looking for, but now I see, I want to hold on to the people who hold me up, I will stick my tongue out and laugh at whoever put me down, I will write and create as I see fit, I will look after myself, I will embrace my vulnerability like cuddling a tender animal. And my shadow and I, we shall dance, dance and dance.
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