Commonly, upon achieving some sort of long term goal, a leader is supposed to have some sort of rousing speech full of pithy insights and inspiring prose.
But what of long-term goals that ultimately involve only the leader? Who are those speeches really for, anyway?
In short: I don’t have a speech or a big post to commemorate the last year I have spent celibate, without intoxicants, focused on my own health and what ended up being yet another extensive series of transformations within transformations.
I don’t have a lot to say about the lessons, the experiences, the challenges, the tests, the few times I faltered and righted myself just in time.
I don’t have a lot to say about the subtle fueling clarity of being sober, how much I like it, or how avoiding bonding sexually did not in fact serve to keep me from breaking my own heart open on others’ moats lined with jagged backbiting rocks.
I imagine at some point when I have easy access to a computer again I will go back and read through my YotN posts, to reflect on all the journey has taught and shown me, much of which I wrote very little about.
I might also observe how the changes in my life which I adopted as part of YotN supported me in the massive internal shifts that had been so long coming and still continue to come. How challenging my most deeply embedded patterns of self avoidance accelerated me to the point that, sometimes, I actually felt my skin ballooning from my bones and whipping off.
I might have more rousing speeches in me, then. Maybe.
For now, I’ll let something my dad randomly said at lunch today speak for me:
“You’ve really become a free spirit, haven’t you?”
‘I guess that depends on what your definition of a free spirit is?’ (Expecting some gripe about what a vandwelling hippie I am about to be)
“You’re not bogged down in an 8 to 5. And, when you want to change something, you… Change it.”
Yeah.
Yeah, I fucking do.