Catching Up With Ourselves
Or the case for avoiding resolutions.....And a yoga retreat in India?
I feel strangely tentative about this year. Oftentimes after an especially difficult year I place all my bets on the next one being better. The blank slate that the 1st January offers up always feels exaggeratedly welcome, as though it’s a line in the sand beyond which we don’t need to take the lumbering sack of the year before. My ever hopeful self believes, or wants to believe, that I might leave it all at the threshold. Close the door on it. Banish it to the past without so much as a backward glance. And then I can step forward, bound even, with a sort of gusto that can only ever be unrealistic. But I leap regardless, refusing the claustrophobia of realism, list of inked resolutions in hand, acutely aware but uncaring about the fairytale of it all.
That my resolutions are usually discarded before we even get to February and that I am frustrated at the past keeping pace with me, shouldn’t ever come as any surprise and yet it always somehow does.
This year I am feeling a little differently. Whether it is ageing, genuine wisdom or - god forbid- creeping cynicism, I don’t feel the same way. Not at all. Rather than leaping across the boundary of the year I have found myself tip toeing, feeling unusually patient, hoping that I can stretch the start line to span as many weeks as possible whilst the year takes its’ shape before me. I am feeling an unfamiliar but overriding need to let things percolate.
The truth is, I don’t yet know what I would like this year to look like. I have still to write anything that even vaguely resembles a resolution. (Aside perhaps to try to learn some poetry by heart). I have the rumblings of ideas, yet to be fully formed and even further from articulated, about a sense of what I might like to do a little more of and a project that might be quietly taking shape, but if anything it all feels more like atmosphere than intent and a sense that - for now at least- more needs to be subtracted than added. Usually this uncertainty would make me feel like I am falling at the year’s first hurdle. My inbox- like yours no doubt -has been a bombardment of calls to be resolved since before the year even ticked over. Productivity experts ( the new school masters) would be be shaking their heads at my refusals. My father in law too- who on the first of January every year sends a group family email imploring everyone to write down their goals, citing ( the now refuted, shh don’t tell him) Harvard study that showed that people who did so were more successful than those who didn’t. I know in time it will be best to have a sense of direction. But I haven’t got it yet. And I am trying not to feel especially apologetic.
Because the truth of the matter is that no matter how much we are counselled we must, we don’t always have a clear idea of what is next, or where we are going and that is okay. Better than okay. There is something hugely valuable in not just admitting to the uncertainty but also- and this is key- attempting to find a degree of comfort in sitting with it. And in my experience this is far from the easy option.
I have over the last year become acutely aware that my compulsion to create lists and fill a diary and plan is in part a worthy desire to make the most of living, to surge forward, to seek purpose and to litter my horizon with as much beauty and bounty as I can. But it is also an attempt to bandaid over the discomfort of living in the limbo of uncertainty, in the fact of the ‘shaky ground’ that Pema Chodren so beautifully counsels we need to make peace with, if we are to live more honestly. Because if we don’t we never confront the acute unreliability that is the foundation of life and we miss too the bounty that lies in these seeming cracks.
In an interview the poet and philosopher David Whyte said “Most people, I believe, are living four or five years behind the curve of their own transformation.” Our inner landscapes are evolving and transforming at a pace and in ways that remain wholly hidden, unless we regularly offer ourselves the time to catch up with ourselves. When we surge unthinkingly into things- an instinctive reaction, a new project, a new year - we risk acting from a place that is already outdated. The danger is we behave in accordance with old patterns and modes of thinking that we have in fact already outgrown. And in doing so we hold ourselves back. An alternative to this constant forward surge is to offer ourselves - deliberately- a measure of waiting. It might be that we seek out even a scrap of solitude after the population of the past weeks; a series of earlier mornings, longer or lone walk, a weekend without commitments. Perhaps we go so far as to give ourselves the gift of a fully fledged retreat, with the space it necessary affords from the otherwise cacophony of life ( see below). But it can as equally be- as David Whyte counsels- just spending a little time looking at a horizon line, with all of its uplift and perspective. There is no prescribed way to ensure this catching up, except that in all ways it is unhurried. And is an act of listening. And requires not just patience but active resistance to the world’s request that we always have an answer. That we instead find a way to, first and foremost, sit longer with the questions. Which might turn out, in the end, to be my resolution for 2025.
I’ll wait, and see.
YOGA RETREAT at Bamboo Yoga, Polem Beach, Goa, India
2nd- 9th March 2025
Would you like some sun on the horizon of your winter?
After the magic of my retreat in India two years ago I am returning in early March to host another week long retreat. Bamboo Yoga’s new home on Polem Beach in southern Goa is literal paradise. Sharing the beach with a small fishing community, whose boats grace every dawn horizon, the huts and yoga shalas are set amidst beautiful tropical gardens on the edge of the beach. The food is incredible, the staff the kindest you’ve ever met, the yoga shalas face the rising and setting sun and the water is gloriously warm. There is the option to go and find activity further up the coast with a ten minute taxi ride or to hide away ith just the company of sea eagles and dolphins and the occasional walk to a secret beach.
I still have some spaces left if you would like to join what is already a beautiful group of women. All expriences of yoga welcome. Email me to be sent a brochure and secure a hut of your own ( or with a friend)- nicolecroft@me.com
