0lvr

As the month progresses and my body is doing strange uncomfortable things, my energy and attention has been turned away from projects, which in turn shone a spotlight on how much importance I was putting on the projects in the first place. I found myself joking here and there about how maybe next year should be self-care year, but I'm more and more convinced those ideas align with depth year principles pretty well.

The point of this year wasn't to complete as many projects as possible using things that I already had lying around. The point was to heal my relationship to stuff and the material world, the here-and-now. On a very simple level that does include rejection of mindless buying. On a slightly deeper level it does include learning to utilize and appreciate all the belongings I've amassed this far. But on a fundamental – you could say: deepest – level I cannot exclude my body from this endeavor. The body is central to the here-and-now experience and it might be the biggest invisible obstacle to connection with the material world I've carried with me all this time. It's not enough to engage in certain external activities. Inner work, shifting perceptions, practicing new thought patterns is also necessary.

I didn't want to include self-care in this year-long quest, because it's such a big, broad, important subject as to deserve its own year of focus. Because I feel I do much better when there's a single direction, and “projects” relating to art or tarot study seemed simple enough and exciting, whereas body-work seems much more daunting, fraught with traps of judgment. Start introducing outer health, inner self-compassion and suddenly the focus goes all over the place, I'm overwhelmed, I can't do it. The day grows full of things I should be doing, things I owe myself, before I even get to the mundane chore list. I'm not really sure how to go about it all, and trying to figure it all out feels like I'm overthinking things, while not really getting anywhere solid.

I'm not going to completely drop my project list, I want to continue. Maybe I can frame some of the body-stuff in terms of projects, too? Or have areas of focus for each week and see what I can do in each? Tarot/study, creating/expressing, health, self-love. I can assign a specific thing to focus on in each area each week, without keeping a hawk's eye on it daily. Maybe I can keep the week's focus list in the stoic journal, just to be reminded in the mornings what my options are, what I considered important enough to honestly try, even if just for a week? Without having it clutter my planner or my scrappy to-do list. I'm not sure, still figuring it out.