Let Go and Keep Going.
Journal Entry: Saturday, January 11, 2025
Let Go and Keep Going
Ok, we are in the new year at this point as you might have noticed. I have been keeping myself busy with my new year’s resolutions and trying to recover my routines after all of the traveling and messing around I was doing starting back in mid November.
I am more or less back in the studio wrapping up unfinished paintings and starting a few new ones. Also finishing the inventory catalog from last year to make sure everything is accounted for and starting up a new journal for 2025. I just start a new Word document to get going as I like to type things rather than hand write in a paper journal. It is so much more useful in my way of thinking.
Reengaging with all of my routines is always the trouble after the disruption of the holiday season but I seem to have come through it in good order as far as I can tell. In fact, as I have mentioned, I have decided to amp things up a bit more and see how that goes. I did have a few things I started last year at this time that didn’t make it all the way to summer - maybe they were more transitional than anything else - but all in all I am pleased with my own progress.
Recognizing that I am getting to be an old geezer I thought I might do a bit of rehabilitation on myself both mentally and physically to make sure I stay as sharp as possible since I didn’t die at forty as I fully expected to do when I was twenty. Most of us probably don’t expect to make it to old age, I didn’t anyway. But now that it looks like I might - since my mom recently turned 90 - I might as well dig in and make the best of it. I certainly have not run out of things to do and my sense of horizon seems to keep getting bigger rather than shrinking.
All of this has been to start writing something so that a topic might come to mind for an article.
So let me see here… Well, before anything else I should mention that one of my step kids Kimber along with her husband Chuck luckily escaped the big Palisades Fire in California this past week but unfortunately their house was completely burned to the ground along with all of the other homes in their neighborhood. They had been living there raising their two kids for the last 20 years.
So, a new beginning has been forced upon them. In the event you would like to help them out with a few bucks to help them get a new start here is the go fund me page https://gofund.me/90382676
I have heard of a number of different artists over the years whose entire body of work has been wiped out by fire. I certainly hope my body of work doesn’t suffer a similar fate but in the end anything can happen at any time. Whatever happens we have to recover from it the best we can and keep going. Who knows how many artists’ works were destroyed in that fire. I am sure many of the people living in that swanky part of town had art collections. Maybe even some of mine or some of yours.
One interesting thing I remember reading one time from Marcus Aurelius - the Stoic philosopher - was that when we die that the only thing we are losing is the present moment. All of the past is already dead and gone and all of the future has yet to happen. I guess he was saying take refuge in the present because that is all there actually is and is the only place you can act from. Let go and keep going.
Well, I have more than hit my writing quote for the day so close enough.
I’ll leave you with a quote to ponder…