Standing at the threshold of another year, it’s easy for me to feel impatient with the clichéd ideas about looking forward, setting new goals, determining to be a better person and whatnot.

 

That’s not entirely fair, though. This time of the year has deep roots in our consciousness, and, whatever shallow thing it has become, we have a need to mark time in this way. We need to pay attention to seasons so that life doesn’t slip entirely away from us while we lose track of what we might become.

 

This tradition goes back a long way…a very, very long way. Apparently, Mesopotamia (Iraq) instituted the concept of celebrating the new year in 2000 BC. The Romans dedicated New Year’s Day to Janus, the pagan god of gates, doors, and beginnings, for whom the first month of the year, January, is also named. The pagan deity Janus was depicted as having two faces: one looking forward and the other backward, suggesting that celebrations of the new year are pagan traditions.

 

Realizing that, it helps me pause for a few moments right now and notice the ravels of ritual and tradition that, even in our fractured, micro-attention-span time, provide strands that lead us back to a rich tapestry if we tug on them a bit.

 

This is a deeply personal time for me, too. I have had several important years in my life, but this one stands out in my memory as a true watershed. I have experienced real magic in ways I did not see coming. (I spoke about this on last week’s podcast, My Own Private Walden . You may tune in to that for the full story if you wish. Click here.)

 



As I described in detail on that podcast, this time last year, I said a simple intention to myself. “I want 2015 to be the healthiest year of my life on every level.” Had I known what I was asking for, I might have been more selective about the layers of myself I was willing to shed, scrape away, and transform.

 

Today, just before I leave the house to go celebrate the changing of years with friends, I am grateful for what has come before. It changed me. I no longer feel that I am on a race to somewhere. 

 

What has emerged in me is a deep sense of becoming.

 

I wrote in the Blessed Are The Weird book (the writing of which has been part of this process—living, feeling, processing, transforming, watching it all…writing about it) that, “…Success for anything or anyone is becoming what it was designed to be. That’s it.”

 

Becoming.

 

Unlike artificial snapshots of what society or advertisers or popular teachers show me as “the best life” and then I flog myself to exhaustion and self-loathing trying to get there, becoming is a thing of honoring the depths of who I am. The forces that shape me; shadow and light, above and below, within and without.

 

Becoming requires patience. Becoming means letting life turn us into something real.

 



 

 

This scrap from The Velveteen Rabbit is perhaps the most beautiful way to say it:

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’

‘Does it hurt?’ asked the Rabbit.

‘Sometimes,’ said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. ‘When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.’

‘Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,’ he asked, ‘or bit by bit?’

‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

 

This year I look forward with a great deal of energy and excitement, but I feel those springing up from a deeper place than before. 

 

Yes, I have books to write and companies to grow and jobs to do and mountains to climb.

 

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost my sense of a place to get to and have fallen in love with what I have become…and what I am becoming.

 

My friends and fellow travelers, I wish you a New Year of becoming. May the path rise to meet your feet with every step you take in love and honesty. And may your hearts be filled with just a little more joy than you can easily handle.