While making resolutions can be inspiring and enlivening, this year I seem to be interested in the opposite. Instead of resolving, dissolving. Opening to possibilities that I’m only dimly aware of, if at all. I don’t want to be constrained by ideas and conceptions of the past year, using them to shape what is to come. If the new year is to be truly new, it will hold experiences I’ve never had, feelings and thoughts I’ve never entertained. From one moment to the next, there may surface in me an impulse or feeling that is unfamiliar. Instead of ignoring it because I haven’t seen it before and don’t know what it means, I will allow it to take over. Maybe I don’t usually act that way. Maybe it’s not who I am or how other people see me. But what if who we are is huge and open-ended? This new year really does feel new, and I want to keep reveling in the newness.   It’s why writing means so much to me. I get to situate myself on a threshold of sheer ignorance and feel closer to life as a whole, that vast and mysterious, ongoing flow. The creative process, of writing as well as living, brings us into direct contact with what is beyond us and deep within us. We cultivate surrender, not knowing what will come through us, or how we will be inspired by the experience of someone else, encountering the world in a way that is unique to them and just as unprecedented. As we put down one word and then the next, new paths of understanding, perhaps amazement will unfold. Or we may come to stillness in a place of profound ignorance. Maybe something I’m sure of now will dissolve in a moment. And there will be room for something new.