Resolutions

As if fulfilling the appearance of Jupiter, the new year began with a rather auspicious start. On the way home from Boulder, on a dark highway south of Loveland, I was pulled over by the flashing lights of a police cruiser from a deputy of the Larimer County sheriff's office. Knowing that cops were everywhere, I had been making sure to drive very carefully.

It turns out I had a headlight out. The deputy could tell I hadn't been drinking so everything was chill (I was glad I turned down the beer in the tent at Occupy Boulder) After scrambling to find my registration, everything turned out OK. He didn't even write me a citation. Instead he just chatted with me, rather sympathetically. I told him I'd been to see a movie, and he asked which one. I told him that I went to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie. He asked me what I thought of it. I told him it wasn't as good as the first one. So that was my first movie review of the year.

It was actually quite a nice feeling, when I drove off without any damage at all. If only all of life's stresses could be melted away like that.

As I drove on into the dark, my mind focused on something that had been going through my head. I thought of how in the past year, I have felt the sharply mounting distress across the country, and have tried to warn and share this insight with as many people as possible. Partly this has been through Facebook, where I have "come out the closet" after a couple years of being laid back, and have been posting many links that have actually caused several people to defriend me. I knew that would be the price. It was part of my plan all along, I think. If they defriend me, then I know at least they read and absorbed what I said.

Facebook, I've said, has felt like a ministry. Although I've found it to be like a quagmire of nothingness at times, I've felt like I had to participate in it, because this is where our culture is right now. I wanted to understand that, and know why things are they way they are, and to "take the pulse" of that part of the world.

But now I feel as if I've reached a limit of my ability to do that. I think I've said what I needed to say. I can't go on with that form of "ministry." It's time to let it go.

While driving, I meditated about how I need to shift into a new mode. While the world is cracking up---and it surely is---it no longer serves the world for me to convey the kind of distress I've been relaying. I'm not doing myself or anyone any good by doing that.

I need to shift into a mode of trying to show people that there is a way forward out of this. I need to start conveying the confidence that I feel inside, that through all of this, there is a miracle that is available to us---a way forward. I need to embody that in my words and actions. I need to inspire that feeling in others by how I act, and what I say. It is time to start focusing on that.

How I'm supposed to do that, I'm not sure. One of the huge themes I am facing in so many things right now is that I don't have any idea of the master plan. That has freaked me out, because I tend to want to know the longterm route of things. But I have to trust that there is a step-by-step way forward for me at every turn. I truly have to take it day by day. Or as a friend of mine said, step, breathe, step.

In the spirit of that, I knew what the first step I had to take. I have to get off Facebook. I was thinking of simply deactivating my account, but I realized that this might erase all of my posts on other people's pages, and leave no way for people to contact me, if they wished. So I decided the best thing to do would be log out, and simply resolve to not log back in. I'll have to tell my sisters that they will have to relay any important family news to me by other means.

So when I finally got home, one of the first things I did before going to bed was to fulfill my first resolution. My ministry is over. It's time to start actually meeting people in person. And also it has given me new impulse to write this blog as much as possible, perhaps every day, after letting it lapse. Of course now I write about much more than movies, as I once did, because I don't go to very many movies any more, and I need to say things beyond the vehicle that once provided. The same with theater performances. But I still want to go to as many as possible. That won't change.

So what's out there for me? Where I am supposed to go in the new year? Who I am supposed to meet? What am I supposed to say? Like so many others right now, I am completely at a loss to furnish answers to those questions. But I know that this the way it is meant to be. I'm not supposed to know the answers to those questions right now. I'm supposed to voyage out and learn what the answers are. So here I go.