Things learned in 2007

Note: your mileage may vary. I don’t “pro­mote” the ideas below — these are mere­ly per­son­al beliefs.

Rather than pre­dict things for 2008, I had rather qui­et­ly look back what I can still dis­tin­guish with my lantern. So here are things learned in 2007.

One

That when we don’t suc­ceed in some­thing, it’s because we don’t want to. Our nation­al train com­pa­ny in France does­n’t real­ly want to run our trains on time –because if it did, it would. I don’t suc­ceed in let­ting go of some respon­si­bil­i­ties, tasks and con­straints, because I don’t real­ly want to. When I can­not find the time and peace to sit down and read a book… when I don’t feel tru­ly hap­py… when I don’t com­plete things… it’s all because of not, sim­ply, but tru­ly, want­i­ng to.
Want­i­ng things is dif­fi­cult. But that’s all it real­ly takes.

Two

That there is noth­ing that we are here to do. None of us has any duty of doing any­thing in par­tic­u­lar. We don’t have to act, or speak, or share, or shine.
The world will nev­er judge. It is sim­ply here sole­ly for us to shine.

And also

That old rusty bicy­cles are beau­ti­ful – what sit­ting in a cock­pit dur­ing a whole flight feels like – how not to repair a com­put­er screen – how a gas heat­ing sys­tem and its plumb­ing work – that some bur­glars real­ly are stu­pid – that kit­ing bare­foot is enor­mous fun – and that there is no thing as plea­sur­able as re-dis­cov­er­ing things.