What was the point? Did it make a difference?
Reviews are mixed, but given the very low investment, it certainly didn't hurt and was worth doing. So I've adopted a new one this year: Engage!
Some of the joy of a one-word motto is how I can read many meanings into it. The more specific, the harder that is to do. But with just one word, multiple contexts can imbue it with multiple layers of meaning to me. And that's all that matters - what it means to me.
The iconic use of the word, copied here, is Jean-Luc Picard commanding the Enterprise into action. I think of it, for me, also as propelling to action. But more specific types of actions than Move was about last year.
I've written about my tendency towards lighthouse keeping before. Much of the time, I'd be perfectly content to live on an island by myself, with some useful work, and a lot of time to just be me, all alone. I love this. But I don't want this always. I value friends, social connections, and also being involved in the public forum to try to do some good. I need to urge myself forward out of my happy little self-centered bubble to engagement.
So I plan family engagements, social engagements, engaging on a civic and political level, and engaging with personal issues such as money and health. I also vow to engage my core muscles as often as I possibly can, to enhance back health!
Enough sitting around. Mr. Riker, Engage!
5 comments:
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Commanding the Enterprise! Yes! Great! Miss your voice. Happy, healthy new year. Glad you are back.
Lighthouse keeping--I have thought about that since girlhood. And read first-person accounts of it (it was very, very hard....a lot of work, and getting supplies to the rocky island, etc.). Still, it's so romantic to think of being on an island in the sea....Did you see that movie? Oh, what was it called? Based on a book? It was really good...they lived in a lighthouse...came out within last few years.
Love Alice
Good motto for all of us, because we are wearing down, and taking more breaks, and getting overwhelmed by the accretion of horror. At lunch we discussed when fidget spinners were in fashion, and we all guessed much longer ago, and were wrong. It was 2017. This administration is interminable.
But no time to hide, gotta ENGAGE.
Liz
Alice, I know the movie you mean, but I didn’t see it. But there was a book several years ago, Ahab’s Wife (overlaps Moby Dick events from the point of view of Mrs. Arab) that included a long idyll tending a lighthouse on an island off Massachusetts. Also, as I child I thought the best I could do was to be a lighthouse keeper’s daughter, because that was what adventure fiction often showed me (wherein a plucky young girl keeps the light going to warn ships during extreme weather and onslaughts of bad guys). But it turns out some of the very earliest federal government payrolls have women as lighthouse keepers in their own right. It was often a family affair, and the women inherited the job when their husbands died. Good to know our true history.
Liz, going to try a new civic engagement tomorrow night. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Nan
Hi NAN! It was called The Light Between Oceans and I loved both the book and the movie. I hope all is going well with ENGAGE! look forward to all getting together soon. Love Alice
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