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“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce
As I moved closer to my goal of Step 365 on my path to extraordinary living, I started to worry about what I would set as my writing intention for 2011. In 2009, I set out to write a post every day that discussed something that made me feel more hopeful. In 2010, I wrote a daily post that described one more step I was taking to live an extraordinary life. I learned so much in those 2 years, and it felt like a streak that would be tough to maintain in 2011.
And then my friend, Amanda, sent me a lovely email and asked me to write a guest post for her blog ZENyc, which focuses on how to maintain balance in the crazy place we know and love as New York City. Of course I said yes and I asked her if she had a specific topic she wanted me to address. She didn’t have anything particular in mind, just a post about how I stay sane in New York.
The mere suggestion of my sanity was very flattering. Sometimes I feel totally off-kilter but apparently I am holding it together well for a majority of the time. New York keeps us on our toes – we grow comfortable with being uncomfortable from time to time. You’ve gotta be a little nuts to live here, and a little more nuts to stay for a while. Thankfully, I’m a lot nuts – gratitude to my upbringing by a very bohemian mother and an austere, psychoanalyst father – so not only do I choose to stay in New York, but I also choose to call it home.
For Amanda’s guest post, I batted around the idea of writing about yoga, having a dog, my amazing friends, my writing, having a quiet home – all topics that I write about all the time. I wanted to do something really unique for Amanda, offer something up to her readers that would be new and helpful. I wrote, re-wrote, and tossed away a number of posts. None seemed quite right.
About the same time that Amanda asked me to write the guest post, one of my co-workers told me about his New Year’s Resolution to be open to new experiences. He said it worked well for him in 2010 and he was thinking of taking it up again in 2011. That sounded like a good idea to me, and inspired me to write a guest post for Amanda’s blog about the topic of beginning. It takes courage to try something new. To have a beginner’s mind seems to me to be the best way to stay balanced. If we’re always beginners, always learning, always energized, always bold and courageous, then it’s possible to achieve great things while keeping our humility. We don’t know what we don’t know, so as beginners we experiment and explore and try, and then try again without beating ourselves up or second-guessing ourselves.
Just writing that post on the beginner’s mind was invigorating, and it got me jazzed to head out into the world and try all sorts of new, cool things. It put more fun and laughter into my writing and my life. Calling myself a beginner, I was able to look at everything with new, fresh eyes. And before I knew it, I had my writing intention for 2011. (Thank you, Amanda!)
In 2011, you’ll find all of my beginnings recorded here. All of my bumbling, fumbling, and shenanigans as I try these new beginner shoes on for size will be exhibited daily for your reading pleasure. Sometimes it will be a story of some experience I had or person I met or place I went. It may just be a cartoon or a quote or a picture. I’ll write about my new business, Compass Yoga, and how it’s going. I hope you’ll come along for the ride with me, take in the sights and sounds of a new writing journey, and tell me about your new adventures, too.
Let’s get going – as an old Levi’s ad once said, “the frontier is all around us.” Our frontiers are waiting.
The image above cracks me up. I hope it makes you laugh, too. Find it here.
This blog is part of the 2011 WordPress Post Every Day Challenge.
Yoga Journal is getting better and better with every issue, or maybe I’m just becoming a better reader of the publication. The last few months of issues have reinvigorated my practice and teaching. The depth of the articles and the deeply moving stories have helped me to re-discover the transformative power of yoga in my life.
Christa Avampato 