One of many reasons to love winter...

There are so many reasons to love winter in the northern hemisphere. One of them is that there are so many cloudy days which push our minds inward so we can reflect on the past and digest it a little further ...like a cow bringing up cud from one of its stomachs in order to chew and extract more nutritional value out of a meal from the recent past.

In this light I'm going to try to go back to last summer here and finish recounting our July ramble out west across the Great Plains.

Thinking, or trying not to, during the dark months

Ice flowing down the Hudson River past Poughkeepsie, New York

The new year usually makes us compare where we are to where we thought we'd be from a year or decade ago. So, I'm not where I thought I'd be, but in the long run probably much better off.

I guess it's important to have plans and goals and work toward them. I guess it's important to be open to whatever comes and react to everything as a new opportunity.

...Now, how to live both ways at the same time? I think the answer is in that part of our brains where our minds aren't, like in an athlete who fails when he thinks too hard about what he's doing. It's probably as simple as thinking about and working on the future and being content in the present. If one side overwhelms the other, I suppose you're thinking too hard and need to lose your mind a bit.

Too much caution sometimes piles up and throws off that balance. From the wisdom of the Butthole Surfers, "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done."

Cheers to a New Year

Sometimes I bother myself by looking at the past year from too narrow a focus and let myself get disappointed that I'm not studying Arabic in Damascus right now or something like that. Instead, I look back and see that I started the year in Budapest, and landed up back in New York where I've been for so long...

When I look at it from a better perspective, I see that in the end I got the ball rolling on several big long-held dreams for my life. Besides, I did a lot of traveling this year after all. After landing back in the States I visited Texas, Michigan (multiple times), Georgia, a wide swath of the Great Plains via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri, and saw more of the Northeast that I hadn't seen in my previous nine years here. And along the way Jen and I spent a great many days with people we love but don't get to see very often. Also, we got to know Margaret (who we live with) and her big, dynamic family.

Scenes from Margaret's house, New Year's Eve, 2009

In the meantime, landing back here has given me a breather needed to start working on several tracks which will hopefully pay off for a long time to come. Cheers to a new year, new opportunities to follow long-held dreams, and for the immediate-term, finally getting back to regularly updating this blog!!