I spent a good part of today putting away the Christmas decorations. It isn’t the traditional “Twelfth Night”, but this just seemed to be right, as mentally I’m already thinking about the coming year rather than reviewing the past one. “Go with the flow!” as they say. A part of this process was the burning of the Christmas evergreens. It seemed appropriate to do this rather than just throw them into the rubbish bin.
As I was feeding bits of greenery into the stove I fell to wondering why I had decided to do this, as it would have been far quicker and simpler just to throw them away. The answer came to me quite quickly. As regular readers of this blog will know, I set great store by symbols. If I wanted a gesture that could stand as an expressive symbol of the New Year, burning was far more apt. There is a completeness and a finality about burning. It would not have been possible for me to change my mind and pull out the pieces from the bin. There are no second thoughts about burning, which implies a whole-hearted commitment to the action.
Yes: that’s it! I committed myself to the New Year and to the future.
Yesterday I spent some time throwing away old drawings, not only in order to make space for the new, but also to sever sentimental ties to the past which I suspected were holding me back. Today I also took the first steps towards disposing of a number of my old academic books which I no longer need. I’m lightening the load of the past. At the time when my wife and I were getting together I remember that she was very much into Feng Shui. It could be that those seeds she planted more than twenty years ago are starting to sprout.