Looking Back at 2023 and Forward to 2024
Last year, I didn’t write anything about the New Year’s Holiday until two days after the magic moment, and all I wrote was this:
I had this long New Year’s post planned but… Sometimes a picture is worth 1000 words. I am where I’m supposed to be. I’m looking forward to 2023. Happy New Year!
So this year, I am posting the same picture, which is now hanging in the south facing enclosed porch you can see in the foreground of the picture above.
I had pictured white wicker in that room, making it feel like summer year round. But then I ended up with too little space for the Swedish furniture that had been sitting in the house downstate. So my year round summer decor gave way to dark, heavy early 19th century (my guess, I grew up helping at my grandfather’s auction house and antiques store) hand carved rustic furnishings from the old country.
Bear with me, I will tie all this together after the next picture.
My reflection here, as I write this Friday evening, December 29 (with my kids and grandkids still in Bangor because of the icy roads today) is that we may have one vision of the future, but that may not be the only possible good outcome. And the white wicker came to mind because this house is so lovely in the summer. But it’s really just as cute in the winter, which seems a lot longer here in northern Maine. The underlying vision was to make this porch-turned-room a place to linger in. The color scheme and the weight of the furniture may be opposites, but the effect is somewhat similar. And I’m probably happier having my old stuff in this room than something new, or new to me, if it were antique wicker.
Similarly, I started out in medicine with fairly concrete expectations of what I would want things to look like. But I ended up working in a few different settings, sometimes because I went looking and sometimes because opportunities suddenly appeared and I was able to decide quickly to accept.
One of the books I moved around as I was organizing my new library is titled Emotional Agility - Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, by Susan David, PhD. She certainly picked a catchy title, and the 11 chapter titles are equally intriguing:
1. Rigidity to agility.
2. Hooked.
3. Trying to unhook.
4. Showing up.
5. Stepping out.
6. Walking your way.
7. Moving on: The tiny tweaks principle.
8. Moving on: The teeter totter principle
9. Emotional agility at work
10. Raising emotionally agile children.
11. Conclusion: Becoming real.
In many areas in life, we may have a pretty good idea of what we want things to feel like, if not exactly what they would look like. But if we focus too much on what we want things to look like instead of what they feel like, we may stay stuck because our own imagination can’t visualize the opportunities that unexpected things present us with.
Dr. David encourages us to be in tune with our feelings, and I agree wholeheartedly. I have let my head navigate sometimes - over the objections of my emotions. I haven’t done any of the personality tests people talk about these days, but I know that even though I love logic and reason, I am often guided more by my emotions. And Dr. David talks about when to follow your emotions and when to superimpose your mind to keep them in check.
So, in 2024 I hope to be even more emotionally agile than I have been before, finding an even better balance between my heart and my mind.
And I am still where I am supposed to be. Who would have thought that a whole new way of working as a doctor would open up right here in Aroostook, Maine. And that I would be the first one to join.
Happy New Year!
