DAY 67

the farewell


This day brings us to the end of this year. So is time to take stock of it

2011 has been a challenging year. I have witnessed how my world (in the widest sense of the term ) has crashed into the evidence of a deep economic crisis that is making me changing my mind about what a safe future means 

I won´t go into this topic in depth, but it has been a sort of serendipity that my journey involves the change of  my priorities so I wasn´t so focused on material goods before all this, because I´m not sure I would have been able to face it otherwise. In fact, 2011 with its ups and downs has been the perfect year to master the art of living the present moment because it has been the only way to avoid nostalgia and uncertainty that pervade my context... yes, the present that I used to give for granted, the present that never had been more important than past and future till today

This year I have said goodbye to my cat, Malú and, also, to a strong financial stability. I have seen how my mother becomes highly fragile and dependent and how my husband has had to face up a extreme makeover of his professional career, his way of living, and the loss of his beloved cat, Missi. I´ve had to deal with unforeseeable difficulties at my work and with an occasional lack of motivation. These have been shocking experiences -yet somehow appealing and filled with wisdom- but they have helped me to see change and death in a softer (although equally painful) way. 

Regardless the sense of insecurity that these events, whose pace has been dramatic, have caused me, they have made me become gentler. So this year I have said goodbye also to my resistance to trust my life completely, to the last preconceived ideas about how my life should be and to a big part of my strictness

Sure enough, as I became familiar with the rawness of this sense of being insufficiently protected, I realized that this involved also standing in vulnerability, learning to feel exposed and this -how curious!, or maybe not- made real my word for 2011: visibility understood as a way to share my journey, my learning, to permit my inner self to emerge and lead my life 

Now I know that the main things that were preventing me from doing that were my perfectionism and my need of guarantee against failure. Once 2011 turned me into a wire-walker without a security nest, I had no option but push my past fears and enjoy the walk. From this moment on, many synchronicities occurred to allow me to be visible

This year, by chance, I have said hello to photography, I have deepened my creative world and I have started to use my true voice more frequently, not only here but also in my work, when I talk to my relatives and beloved ones and when I talk to myself

Of course, all the things I have mentioned above have required time and dedication, and must be interpreted in the context of my ongoing journey. However, 2011 have given me the chance to explore new forking paths and achieve my aims. It has been a hard and contradictory year, where sorrowful feelings have been deeply woven together with a great sense of openness and oneness. So today I only can be thankful.