Tag Archives: New Year

New Year’s Resolutions for 2022

by Woody

“New Year’s is a harmless annual institution,” wrote Mark Twain, “of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”

Let me use this great occasion to wish you a happy New Year and share some humbug resolutions for 2022. Feel free to borrow as you wish and, like me, break at your own pace.

I resolve to…

Keep in mind the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.”

Own my day.

Try to live up to the wisdom of these lines by Rudyard Kipling: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same.”

Try also to treat Fret and Anxiety like the imposters they are.

Conserve, conserve, conserve water and energy.

Pass up the nearest open parking spot in order to leave it for someone, perhaps an elderly person, who might find it difficult to walk very far.

Give compliments 10 times more frequently than unsolicited advice. Make that 100 times more frequently.

Try to, as Eleanor Roosevelt advised, “Do one thing every day that scares you.” Or, at least, challenges me.

Try to be as excited about learning new things as my 3-year-old granddaughter Maya always is.

As my lodestar Coach John Wooden preached and practiced, “Make friendship a fine art.”

Heed Henry David Thoreau’s wisdom, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it,” and try not to exchange foolishly.

Unplug, unplug, unplug.

Read deeply from good books – and shallowly from fun books, too.

Keep in mind this wisdom from my Grandpa Ansel: “The only way to travel life’s road is to cross one bridge at a time.”

When travelling, the ongoing pandemic willing, follow my friend Ken’s sage advice: “Be sure to turn down a hidden alleyway, or go inside a quiet doorway off the beaten path, because that’s where you’ll find some of the most memorable experiences.”

Find memorable experiences in my everyday life.

Buy two of anything a kid under age 10 is selling.

Check my email inbox less frequently and write more snail-mail letters.

Shop at local small businesses first, local chains second, and buy online as a last resort.

Be quicker to forgive and slower to criticize – including of myself.

Keep a coffee-chain gift card in my wallet for when I come across someone down-on-their-luck.

Stop to smell the roses – and daydream at the clouds, savor pastel sunsets, marvel at starry night skies, and appreciate all of nature’s art.

Similarly, heed John Muir’s call to “Keep close to nature’s heart and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.”

Sunscreen, sunscreen, sunscreen.

Pick up litter – and not just on Beach Clean Up Days.

Play hooky more often and go to the beach to wash my spirit clean with salt water.

Give flowers out of the blue and not just to mark special occasions.

Keep in mind the words of Wayne Bryan: “If you don’t make an effort to help others less fortunate than you, then you’re just wasting your time on Earth.”

Lastly, again as Coach Wooden advised, I resolve in 2022 to try to “Make each day a masterpiece.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

Leave a Ghost Light on for 2016

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s highly anticipated new book “STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” is NOW available! Order your signed copy HERE!

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Leave a Ghost Light on for 2016

It is time for the curtain to fall on 2016. And not a moment too soon, some would say, for it has been a surreal year – a Leap Year at that – of tumult and tragedy and tribulation.

But it has also been 366 days of highlights and hopefulness and happiness. And so, as with all years, it is bittersweet to turn out the lights and lower the curtain.

I was reminded of the theater metaphor recently while driving past the old Ventura County Star building on Ralston Street, empty now for a decade and a half since the paper moved to a new cavernous edifice in Camarillo. Seeing the abandoned haunts, I reminisced briefly and could almost hear the echoes of clicking keyboards – a pleasing newsroom symphony to these ears.1ghostlight

In journalism “-30-“ means “the end,” but I like to think “-30-“ has never come for the music inside those old Star walls.

I once mentioned to my friend, Stephenie, that the cacophony of a newsroom is one of my favorite sounds on earth and she replied that she delights in an orchestra tuning up before a performance because it is a prelude of “all the good yet to come!”

What a lovely thought, it seems to me, and so perfectly pertinent on this closing day of December for we are not only saying farewell to the old year, we are greeting the New Year and “all the good yet to come” in the next 12 months.

Thinking of goodbye again brings to mind the old Star building; I hope the last person to leave failed to turn off all the lights. Specifically, I like to think one solitary light was purposely left on, like a ghost light – usually a bare incandescent bulb on a portable light standard – aglow on the stage in a theater.

Superstition demands that a theater should never go completely dark, even when it is unoccupied, and that is a lovely thought for a newsroom, too.

While I have never been a part of the theater, my daughter has been. Not as an actor or stagehand, but as a playwright with her works performed in Los Angeles and New York and, firstly, Ventura.

That debut experience was life-changing. It was in high school and the drama teacher, Dennis Enfield, selected her play as the spring production and asked her to be the assistant director.

“ ‘Mr. E’ was an Irishman with a broad smile and an ever-present twinkle in his eye,” my daughter recalls fondly. She also remembers five months of casting and rehearsals; selecting costumes and music; working with set design and lighting; rewriting scenes and finally the curtain rising for an audience.

“On Opening Night, I had difficulty holding back my tears,” she says, her voice seasoned with emotion a decade later. “Seeing my words brought to life onstage was nothing short of magical.”

Closing Night, my daughter was tearful for a different reason.

“All of us were feeling glum,” she shares. “We had reached the end. Months and months of hard work and this was it – the last performance.”

1_2016Mr. E knew what his troupe was feeling. Before the curtain rose, he called the cast and crew together and told them this: “Theater is ephemeral and fleeting, like a dream. It doesn’t last forever. Each performance is unique and sacred. That is what makes it bittersweet – but that is also what makes it beautiful.”

This is true not only in the theater. Our lives, too, are ephemeral. So are calendar years.

As we step onto the stage of 2017, let us keep this in mind – that each day, like each performance on a theater stage, is unique and sacred. Let us try to make each day a masterpiece, enjoy its beauty, and then move on to the next fleeting performance and to “all the good yet to come!”

But first, as the curtain lowers on another year, let’s leave a ghost light on to illuminate the golden moments of 2016 we want to remember.

 

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Advice: Chase Butterflies

by Woody

STRAW_CoverWoody’s new book STRAWBERRIES IN WINTERTIME: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter is available for Pre-Order HERE NOW! In time for the holidays!

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My Your Heart Go Aflutter in New Year

Chase butterflies.

When asked recently to write a brief essay on the topic of “A Letter Of Advice To My 21-Year-Old Self,” that was my answer in a nutshell. Chase butterflies.

I will soon explain more fully.1butterfly

But first let me say that chasing butterflies also seems timely advice, for anyone of any age, as we begin our 2016 journey around the sun.

Even though spring is yet a far ways off, the turning of the calendar pages from the old year to the new always brings to my mind a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. The caterpillar’s past has been shed and left behind; the world is anew and bright and full of promise.

Moreover, most butterflies emerge in the morning – again, the image of a new year’s fresh beginning. Indeed, New Year resolutions are goals for a personal metamorphosis of sorts.

But my advice to chase butterflies is more than metaphorical.

Remember in your youth when you raced after Monarchs with a butterfly net? There are few images of girlhood or boyhood more carefree.

Perhaps you did not even catch any butterflies. That didn’t even matter because the joy was in the running, in the sport of it, in the zig-zagging through a field until you were out of breath – the breathlessness, in part, from laughing at your “failure” to catch the elusive fluttering prey.

Lesson from the child: when is the last time as an adult you didn’t let “failure” get you down and instead happily laughed it off?

Yes, we would all do well to pursue our adult passions with this same sense of joy and play as we did racing barefooted in the grass with a cheesecloth net-on-a-stick in our hands.

Chasing butterflies also means embracing things that scare you – things that make your stomach flutter with nervousness.

As I wrote in that letter to my 21-year-old college self: “Remember the swarm of butterflies doing cartwheels in your stomach the first time you asked out that gorgeous girl you are now dating? Spoiler alert, Woody, that works out marvelously even 34 years later!”

The butterflies of trying new things and taking chances should not be avoided. The riskier thing, truly, is to remain inside a safe cocoon. As the Roman poet Virgil noted, “Fortune favors the bold.”

Fortune favors butterfly chasers, I say.

Or as Mark Twain so wisely put it: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

And, he might have well added, do things that make the butterflies in your belly dance.

Eleanor Roosevelt knew this, famously advising: “Do one thing every day that scares you.”1Bold

If the word “scares” scares you, keep in mind that “frightening” is a close cousin of “exciting.” So when a new challenge or unchartered adventure or out-of-your-comfort-zone opportunity gives you butterflies, run (BEGINITAL)towards(ENDITAL) it not from it!

Throw off your bowlines and learn a new language. Take guitar lessons. Or golf lessons. Enroll in a painting class. Sign up for volunteer work.

Train for a marathon. Learn to surf. Climb Mount Whitney.

Start writing that novel you have long felt you had inside you. Ask someone on a date – or accept the invite.

Join Toastmasters and tackle your fear of public speaking. Tackle a career change from the safe job you have, but doesn’t excite you, to the one of your dreams.

Travel. Explore. Go sailing. Go for it!

I closed my letter to my younger self with John Wooden’s “7-Point Creed,” which I consider to be concise wisdom of great breadth and depth:

Be true to yourself.

Make each day your masterpiece.

Help others.

Drink deeply from good books.

Make friendship a fine art.

Build a shelter against a rainy day.

Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.

And, I concluded, add this eighth point: Chase butterflies.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Wooden&Me_cover_PRCheck out my new memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece”