I am excited

         With the Year of the Tiger coming to a close, I am excited to take what I've learned and apply it to the Year of the Rabbit.  This past year has given me a lot of great insight into my training and in unearthing what kind of person I am/want to be.  

        I had many ups and downs this year, but with a lot of reflection, I've seen the progress that I have made, and eased up on my mindset that I have to be one-hundred all the time.  Sometimes I'll be one-twenty, other times, I might only be sixty, but the point is to be consistent with showing up.  Just showing up can have a huge impact.  It also allowed me to stay on-top of my training, instead of just throwing in the towel each time I felt lousy about myself.  Sure, it sucked mentally when I was having an off day/week/month, but I never stopped.  I kept pushing forward, even though it felt like I was just banging my head against a brick wall.  The thing about training when I'm feeling negative mentally, is that I know where my potential/baseline is at, and when I don't achieve that it can be very degrading, however, the reality is that I'm doing better than I think.  Ego has a way of giving us tunnel vision, where all we see is the negatives, when really there is a whole world of positives that you are blind to.

        This coming year is also full of exciting new potential.  Aside from picking a new weapon to play around with and hone, and learning a new hand form, I have decided to get my certification in Yoga Teacher Training, that starts on January 2oth and runs till April for 220 hrs. worth of learning.  It will first off, help me with my continuing education hours to hold my Acupuncture license, give me more tools to help my clients with, and help deepen my own practice.  Oh, and of course the benefit of being more mobile and flexible for my Kung Fu.  I'm also excited for my creative writing plan for the year.  I've committed myself to writing at minimum 10 creative short stories and sharing them on Kwoon Talk for the team to read, and to hold myself accountable.  To have some fun with it, I'll probably have the team pick what genre, setting, names to use.

        I am excited for a new start, but admittedly, the start of a new year, be it calendar or Lunar, always makes me feel a certain way.  There's this feeling of promise, of new beginnings, but I also tend to feel a bit of an emptiness or more accurately a hollowness surrounding that.  The start of a new year is really just arbitrary, because we can all choose at any time to begin anew.  So having the collective conscious putting so much emphasis on a single day is pointless.  It just creates stress and unwanted pressure over some abstract timeframe that we place upon ourselves.  I make changes because I want to, because  I see a need; not because a day on the calendar tells me too.  I have 365 (sometimes 366) viable days to choose to begin again.  Besides my feelings on that matter, here we are faced with a new calendar year, and soon to be new Lunar Year, and yes, I can't help but feel excited for what awaits me.