Resolution, Revolution

“I have often—too often—felt like a tourist in my own life, pausing long enough to take a snapshot or buy a tacky souvenir, but not to see or do or learn anything memorable or enduring. I dressed the part, too. In my youth, my passport to the unexamined life bore many, many stamps.”—Burt Kempner

Pinhead Angel 

By Burt Kempner

GAINESVILLE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—January 2020—I have often—too often—felt like a tourist in my own life, pausing long enough to take a snapshot or buy a tacky souvenir, but not to see or do or learn anything memorable or enduring. I dressed the part, too. In my youth, my passport to the unexamined life bore many, many stamps.

I have been battling this tendency as I’ve gotten older, and I’m declaring 2020 as the year of quiet revolution: in consciousness, creation, and manifestation. Like a true traveler, I aim to give as much of myself as I take from others. 

A woman once screamed at me: “Stop looking into my soul!” She reached across the table, picked up a salt shaker and hefted it in her hands, weighing whether to throw it at me. I hadn’t looked into her soul. I made her do it to herself. But that was then. Now I’ve pledged to shapeshift from observer to participant.

Outside my window right now, there’s an imaginary blanket of snow, a pristine new year unsullied by disagreements, mistakes, or disappointments, throbbing with promise and possibility, and I’m in here writing stories. Enough, people. I’m tired of sitting here with a lump in my throat the size of life itself. What are we waiting around for? Let’s make some tracks already.

A very happy new year to you all.