Continuous Project Altered Quarterly | December 2023
Happy Solstice!
Reflection comes so organically as one annual cycle comes full circle, and another begins. New cycles can bring excitement and anticipation and plans for change. They can also give rise to anxiety and overwhelm: There are a lot of “what ifs” to field in a rapidly, radically changing world, let alone all of the uncertainties of our own lives.
We know the past can’t be changed, and becomes dimmer with each passing year. Nonetheless, our minds can linger—and even dwell—in that murk. And though we can’t know what the future holds, we shine beams out into that darkness, inventing narratives of how our lives will unfold.
This week, I’m spending sustained time reflecting on what I experienced in 2023, and envisioning the year ahead for me personally and for Continuous Project in 2024. It’s an annual life and work ritual that I time to coincide with the winter solstice. Amid this week of review of what’s passed and commitment to plans for the future, I’m particularly aware that clarity of purpose can only arise in the present. To pay attention to the present isn’t to deny the past or avoid the future; we’re right to embrace, integrate, and remember our histories and to face what’s ahead with courage and intention. Perhaps that clarity of purpose in the present allows us to have a more benevolent relationship to what is gone and what’s to come.
Today, on this year’s shortest day of the year, I woke up before dawn, in darkness that was quickly becoming the past as daylight emerged. In just a few short hours, the darkness of the future will fall. These daily cycles, and the seasonal cycles they lead us through, can help us see that to live is to exist in concert with perpetual movement and change. In the process of designing my future this week, I keep remembering that what comes next is emergent: The present is already, always, and always already emergent. It’s a comingling of the past and future, a momentary glimpse into nonlinear presence.
The solstices embody this emergence and offer so much for us to learn. Like the present, what I'm learning from this year’s winter solstice is emergent. I can't yet know what the future holds. As I reflect and plan, I’m paying close attention and trusting that time will tell.
Continuous Project in 2024
The coming year will bring a handful of nuanced (but, I think, significant) operational changes to how you experience Continuous Project. Please keep an eye out for an edition of NOT A NEWSLETTER that outlines the services we'll offer in 2024. Highlights include group consulting; an expanded format for Parallel Practice: Growth Planning for Working Artists; and Office Hours for current clients. If you've worked with CP before, you'll receive an email soon with details on what to expect in 2024, and a New Year greeting should land in your mailbox soon, too.
Please email me with questions, comments, and suggestions, or just to say hello—I love to hear from you.
