I resolve…

Not to assume I know who I am.

Yes, there’s other things, too, relating to exercise, meditation, etc. All the usual stuff. And, I made the “guilt resolutions” very, very light… There’s a reasonable chance I can keep them.

But I realized that I want to go a bit deeper than that this year. If the reason we make resolutions is to change ourselves, maybe the fault lies not in needing to change this “person” we’ve come to think we are, but in assuming we’re that person in the first place.

Yeah, I’ll take a silly Internet personality quiz in a heartbeat… but I really want to see what happens if I scratch off some of my major assumptions about Jon. For instance:

I’m an introvert.
Am I this year? How will I know?
I don’t go out much.
That was true… what’s true now?
I start lots of things that I don’t finish.
Really? Who says?
I live more in my head than my heart or my body.
Interesting. We’ll see.

In other news:
I’m getting ready to restart the WisdomReading group as a separate blog. If you’re interested in reading The Gospel of Thomas, The Dhammapada, The Tao Te Ching, or The Upanishads, drop me a line, and I’ll email you the URL and other details when it’s ready. If you participated in the WisdomReading group last year, the format will be different. There will be posts once a week for each of those Scriptures, so if you don’t like the Upanishads, for example, but can’t get enough of Thomas, no problem. just read the weekly Thomas post and comment on it.

My language study is coming along quite well. I started studying Spanish in October, and I guess I’m at an intermediate level now. I grew up on the Mexican border, but had a strange resistance to learning Spanish… really, I could say “please,” “thank you,” “Where’s the bathroom,” and little else. Now I’ve got a better-than-beginner vocabulary, pretty good knowledge of the simple tenses (except the damn subjunctive), and I can read fairly decently, such as El Pais and Yahoo! Spain. Now, I’m working on more complex grammar issues, listening, and speaking.

I plan to continue working hard on Spanish for the next two months, and to start studying Catalan in March. I’ve been brushing up on Esperanto along the way. I wonder if I could really be quadrilingual by the end of the year? By then, I’d like to be able to translate the “Spirituality” pages of my site into Spanish, Catalan, and Esperanto, and to be able to correspond in those languages.

I’ll soon be doing a series of posts on love.

Everyone, Happy New Year! Bonan Novjaron! Feliz año nuevo! Bon any nou!

13 thoughts on “I resolve…

  1. Is an introvert who doesn’t go out much doing that because he is going ‘in’ more than an extrovert?

    I read a recent article that said people who have a lot of things they don’t finish are people who have an above average interest in a wide variety of things.

    In my earlier years in martial arts I was constantly told I was too mental. Now, that can be taken several ways, lol. One day a visiting Master told a fellow student to “stop thinking so much.” She walked away, puzzled by his statement, and thought a lot about it.

  2. Happy New Year, Jon.

    I’d love to have you send me the link for the new study blog. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to participate, but I’d love to read the text snippits and the responses.

    Re: Not assuming you know who you are… So often it seems we describe ourselves and the description isn’t quite accurate. We are always changing, one moment to the next, and yet we try to pin ourselves to descriptions. I like it when you keep surprising me.I like it when I take a risk to be more than I thought I was.

    A painting teacher once asked me the best question anyone had ever asked. He said, “Why do you limit who you are?”

    Peaceful blessings to you, dear friend,
    Meredith

  3. I just picked up Easwaran’s translation of the Dhammapada. Thanks for turning me to on to his excellent translation of the Upanishads. I already have several translations of the Tao te Ching and the Gospel of Thomas, so I’m ready to go!

    When you get the group up and going, I’d love to post an announcement about it on my Blog of the Grateful Bear.

  4. I liked my tarot card… Please count me in for the new blog… and looking forward to the upcoming posts. (Now why do my comments here sometimes not show up? Firefox?)

  5. Everyone, thanks for your interest in resuming the reading group. We should have that up and running in a couple of weeks.

    Julie, you got me. It’s not FF… It’s the only browser I use.

  6. Sign me up for the discussion group! I’m interested in the Tao Te Ching and the Upanishads. I take it you like Easwaran’s translation? I’ll grab it from Amazon.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.