Thursday! 3-9: Ready, Steady, Wait For It...
V3, I9
Happy New Year, my friends! I hope the past two weeks have been, on balance, more good than ill to you and yours. Here at Casa de Bise1, the bolsa2 has been mixto3, but I’m grateful for an awful lot. The season wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but that’s okay. That’s how life works some years, right? Plans don’t always pan out. You4 get a little slack and don’t make definite plans to get out of a career hole or a little personal ditch. Sometimes, you find out that your issues that have held you back will take a little more time to unravel than you thought. Sometimes you even find out that the issues you thought you had are different issues entirely.
In other words: Life. It goes on.
You knew that, though, didn’t you? Life goes on until it doesn’t, but that doesn’t do you an ounce of practical good. The new year is already more than three days old and what in the world have you done? Why are you waiting? What’s holding you back? You should be running, hustling, doing that one thing you picked last week like I said. What’s wrong with you?
Did you feel your heart rate increase a little reading that last paragraph? I did. I even typed each sentence more quickly than the one before. I can feel the pressure to achieve and get moving and win.
Hang on, though. Before we all go charging head-fist through the brick wall of Winning 2023 with Maximum Hustle, let’s consider a very important face. Ready?
You don’t have to.
Let me write that in bigger letters, so it gets seen over the clamor of regular life restarting: YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
You don’t have to hustle right now. You don’t have to come out of the starting blocks with your pants on fire, running like the hounds of heck are haunting your heels. That one thing you haven’t quite chosen yet? You don’t have to have it picked already. You don’t have to.
[Before we go on, would you consider backing me up as a Patron? — $2, $5, or $20 — you can support my work, my art, and get the occasional exclusive bonus goodie. Thank you!]
You do have time to think and make a couple little plans. You have time to take a deep breath and draw in all your strength so that when you launch — and you will launch this year — you can do so at your pace, under control, and with a real and achievable goal in mind. You have time to structure your artistic year so it makes sense and it’s entirely okay if you haven’t done it yet. You have the whole year, remember? That one thing we talked about last week isn’t immediate. You can take a couple of weeks to answer important questions, such as:
What, exactly, do I want to do?
Is that a reasonable goal to accomplish in a year?
If not, can I cut it into bits and do one of those bits for the win?
Can I build a rough timetable right now that I can follow to completion?
If you need time to work out those answers, take that time. Better you do that and finish one goal than charge out all fire and fury, then burn up in a couple weeks because you didn’t know where you wanted to go nor how to get there.
This year, I want to be a big help to you. I want every one of you to get closer to your creative goals — and not by some nebulous measure. I want you to take a real step that not only gets you where you want to go but is real enough that you can show off. Remember my goal? I want to write a poem I think is good enough for publication, then send it out to as many places as it takes to find someone who will publish it. When I get that, you’d better believe I’m going to come right back here and show every one of you. I won’t just do that because I want to share my win with you5. I'll do that to help encourage you. I want to use my eventual win as a beacon around which you can rally if you need.
And I want you to do the same with me. Come over and tell me what you’d like to do this year — the one thing you either have picked or will soon pick. Then come back when you get there so we can share the joy of your win! I’ll encourage you and you encourage me? Does that sound okay? Heck, you can even share it in the comments so everyone else can support you and celebrate with you!
A couple of you have already written to me and I promise I will get back to you as soon as things slow down and I sort out my “normal” schedule. I can tell you I’m happy — you gave me reasons to be happy — and I’ll get back to you with my happiness soon. Probably this week, but you know how things can go, right?
So, here we go, right into 2023. We’re going to pick our one thing and we’re going to take a little time to make sure we aren’t running off crazy with it. We’re going to listen to our own schedules and our own ambitions and no one else’s6. We're going to get the win we want, the one that suits our own needs.
Ready? Steady?
¡Vamos!
What I Wrote Last Week
My lovely wife bought me a lifetime subscription to Rosetta Stone for Christmas (at a ridiculously cool discount!), so you will get the occasional Spanish word dropped in, because my mind is now full of many of them!
bag
mixed
And by “you”, I mean “I”.
Although I will want that. Believe it!
Not even mine! I mean that. Run the race you want to run this year and if that means blazing through January like a brilliant comet, then blaze on! Just get that thing done you want to get done. That’s all.