As we head into the New Year, social media is filled with people posting their resolutions for the coming year.
Dieting and exercise are two of the most common things being posted. It won’t take long before the excuses begin to appear why those resolutions are going down the drain.
You have to cook for your family, so it’s hard for you to diet. Diet food is too expensive and you are too busy to follow through.
You can’t afford a gym membership, you don’t like going to the gym alone, or you are too busy. Looks like the same list, same excuses, just a different year. I, myself, have made some of those same resolutions and the excuses are very familiar. There was no list of resolutions for me this year, instead I decided to make changes.
Dieting and exercise may be what you need to change but first making changes on the inside may bring about the things you want to change on the outside.
If you are stressed, your life full of clutter and chaos, how can you expect to achieve anything? Start this year by decluttering your life, and change the way you look at yourself.
How you feel inside can truly affect the way you show yourself to others. If you are uncomfortable in your own skin, you project this to the outside world. Let’s begin to change your mindset and make you more comfortable with yourself.
Seeing Winter Anew; Embracing Stillness
Out of the bosom of the Air
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
To those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, we move towards December’s coming of winter. We equate winter with harshness, cold and stillness. Indeed, it’s the time when the blossoms, trees and world have gone into hibernation, rest and retreat. But to many cultures, winter represents potentials building within a cyclical womb.
In the last ever panel of one of my favourite cartoons (Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson), the two main characters embark across a snowy scene with their sled, marveling about the gleaming snow. “It’s like having a big sheet of paper to draw on,” muses Hobbes, to which Calvin replies, as they head off into the sea of white, “A day full of possibilities, it’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy…. let’s go exploring!”
Life is full of beginnings and endings, and though we fear endings, an end represents a beginning. When I painted this scene of a tree standing in a winter landscape, I had the idea to leave half of the image blank and white, “it’s like having a big sheet of paper to draw on,” an untapped potential… something ripe and ready for creation in the right time.