27 Ways to Welcome the New Year!

Dearest and most cherished Talkinggrid  Readers, Commentators, Contributors, Donors, and Critics,

Thank you, again for allowing Talkinggrid  into your life in 2012 or 13… whenever you started to visit this lowly yet unique web-site… the voice of a quirky, cute, fuzzy thinking, artist ––Frau Kolb—on the loose,  a wild (art) Party (performance) Person from New York… or is she from the Caribbean, IF so… what is with this Frau… Business?  

(Writing is therapeutic.  Reading this I hope you feel healed of your own insignificance and connected to the larger whole of human experience.)

Seven DAYS into the NEW year… Frau Invites you reconsider your resolutions and arrive at a better approach.

So… here we go:

27 Ways to Welcome  The NEW YEAR!!! 

1.)  Don’t stop.  Think about the holiday season as a period for celebrating the magic, the light, and the eternal unending love.  These are good reasons to take better care of yourself: cook, clean-the-house, groom the self, and socialize.  If you did a solid rendition of Thanksgiving, way back in November you: ate well, home cooked organic and healthy food, fresh made with lots of carrots and celery and perhaps… turkey/tofu turkey.  

Now, in January, we launch the NEW year with French bubbly and friends.  Do: have people over to your still decorated holiday home.  Don’t go out on New Year’s Eve: it is always disappointing.  Expensive and loud, the holiday boils down to freezing outdoor mayhem: don’t bother.  

2.) Let GO!  Review the last year.  What worked?  What habits/people/places demand to be released “the their highest good,” in the NEW Year?  Let these people, positions, and mistakes be a part of the past and make a clean rip into the NEW YOU! 

3.)  Make a list of everything you LOVE about yourself and want to enhance.  What are your best qualities and how are you going to improve your game/performance/results/numbers/stats in 2014.  Focus on what you do well, love to do, and want to do more… IF it works for you, brings you good, then do more.  (Seems obvious, I know yet, it is New Year and every New Year, is an opportunity to review and make changes.)

4.)  Invest in creating a New Year that reflects what and who you are or desire to become.  

5.) Don’t forget your monthly spa treatment.

6.) Carefully put away the holiday decorations.  Collecting ornaments over the decades and generations, telling stories of family members long gone is one of the most holiday enhancing activities I reserve time for.  Yet, packing away our little treasures to be used again, next year, extends the holiday glow, just a little longer.  (Atheists can skip this step.)

7.)  Decide what 2014 is going to be about for YOU!   Give the year a title.  For example; “This is the Have-Toned-ABS or Eat-Only-Organic-Meats,” Year. This brings focus to your efforts and makes it easy to look back next year on your achievements.   Develop a one year plan for personal success.  What does, “success,” mean to you?  Shave it down to five words.  Keep these words close, make them your mantra, become the butterfly you are.

8.) Plan to have a great year.  What do you have to look forward to?  If the answer is “No Thing.” Well… why? 

What did you do to make it so… awful?  What can you do this month, TODAY, Now… to make it better?

9.) Remember to express gratitude to all the beautiful people who toss you a smile, a quarter, a tip, a bit of love; here-and-there are people that give you just enough love to keep you going.  Thank them, again. 

10.)  Be nice.  Be generous.  The more you give the more YOU get.  Don’t be afraid to LOVE passionately.  Dive in in 2014 to the power of kindness.  YOU can do it. 

12.) Give everyone space to be themselves, including yourself.  Accept that you have issues and that you are not likely to change, yet you might try… occasionally… in the name of tradition, to reform yourself with clock-like regularity around this time of year, to no avail because you are basically always going to be the boring old goat that has to piddle and poo. 

12.)  Read more books.  Make more time by cutting back on the freakin’ entertainment that consumes much of everybody’s time.  We all watch shows.  Even I, the great lunatic sage, FRAU KOLB, succumb to the allure, of a beautiful human (think: Don Draper in Mad Men) uttering brilliantly written lines as though they had just ***thought*** to say THAT outrageously well crafted LINE!  Wow, films and television shows thrill us and impress upon us the idea that somewhere else there are humans so slick and sexy that they never have to brush their teeth or eat right.  Films, videos, digital media…. all consume our attention and give back very little. Yet, books are friends that tell stories slowly, giving you time to think and flesh out ideas.  Read a good novel or two or ten this year.  I recommend it for your health.  I also say: “No, thank you!” to digital books.  They just don’t work for me.  But the more I read paper books, the more I love how slow they go.  I adore the space between the words.   I sip the stream of words and let each ideas percolate on my tongue   I savor the moments, meanings, and characters found in books.  When humans fail me, when life sucks, when I get confused and feel homeless: I retreat to books for comfort and warmth and to help repair my spirit.  Try it.  It might work for you, too. 

13.) Focus on finance, with February right around the corner, it is time to think about your fiscal health.  Did you budget properly for the holiday expenditures or did the holiday hype take you by surprise, again, this year?

14.) Are you brushing up on your French/Mandarin/Portuguese?  GOOD!

15.) Plan a vacation for yourself.  You can and will go somewhere fun this year.  

16.) Spend time with your favorite poet.  This year on New Year’s Day I dove into “Leaves of Grass,” by no-one-less than Walt Whitman.  Now… IF you haven’t read Whitman since grade school GET TO IT.  Whitman rocks.

17.) Get ready for the LA Contemporary Art Fair, which is the highlight of the social calendar for Muses and the Amused on the West Coast.  Get ready for whatever event floats your boat and can be this month’s highlight, plan one for each month, and thus, map out your year, sketching a picture of an ideally stimulating and uplifting mental landscape, sculpting an environment, rich with possibility for enriching your soul.

18.) Cultivate your lighthearted nature by spending time outside, inside, and everywhere-in-between enjoying the fact that YOU exist.  

19.) IF you are not aware of why you are alive, this might be a good time to figure that out.  Apply the steps above.  IF you are aware of your purpose (everyone has a least one if not thousands of good reasons to be good, kind, loving, and take care of others, better). 

20.) Try a NEW approach.  Reconsider your past moves and plan to dance to a new drum beat.  YOU, after all, are the only person that can make you happy.

21.) Wish everyone peace and prosperity.  There are more than enough resources for everyone on the planet to live well.  Yet, it is up to each individual to define who they are and what they want, while respecting the rights and wishes of others.  There is no need to compete with anyone other than your former self, this or any other year.  

22.) Stressed?  Take it as a sign.  You require rest.  Don’t let the demands of life wreck havoc on your self-care schedule.  Relax.  Do it as a duty.  Take a deep breath and exhale blessings onto this NEW year which stands naked before you.  Kiss it.

23.)  Kiss yourself.  Do it.  Kiss your elbows, hands, knees.  YOU deserve LOVE.  Give it to yourself.

24.) Pick clothes that address the whether best.  YOU don’t need a lot of gear. Trust me.  You only need one outfit or two that work without a hitch to get you from one season to the next in style.  Warmth is an issue for most of North America in January.  Keep warm.  Enjoy discovering new clothes that are on sale now and in February which will make your winter a pleasure.  

25.) Embrace the weather.  Enjoy the storms.  Plan ahead so you ALWAYS HAVE organic FOOD in the house, in the pantry, on the shelf… somewhere have a treat or two stocked… so that when it is really cold out you can snuggle up with a good book, a brandy, or a camomile tea… and when you do curl up like a baby in uterus think: thank goodness, I have a home.  IF however, you are homeless and happen to be reading Frau Kolb’s blog for kicks at the public library, I’d like to ask you… WHY?  I mean, “Why, are you homeless and reading Talkinggrid at the public library?”  I think that is weird.  I don’t mean being homeless is weird.  Many people, millions… maybe are homeless, right?  I don’t know.  I’ve not been homeless in a couple decades and when I was I was young and it was a choice because I wanted to LIVE and adventures beckoned. Any way… embrace the weather.

26.) Pat yourself on the back: you made it this far.  Not only did you survive 2013, which truth be told was a really challenging year, but you read all 26 of Frau Kolb’s 27 recommendations or suggestions for cliche busting paradigm shifting ways to launch the NEW YEAR in style, bonbons of sweet truth meant to enlighten and excite you and encourage your personal growth, which is what Talkinggrid is becoming…. a place you can come and read about how and what Frau Kolb might do to get through “The Valley of Death,” which is so familiar to many people, that suffer quietly and feel lost in the crevice of creation which is NOW and HERE.

I’m no Virgil.  Yet, I’m one woman, making my life work, well enough… that I keep writing, reading, dancing, playing music, loving painting, and dreaming creating, producing, and discovering ART projects in 2014.  

 I’m not going to deny that 2013 was a rough bitch in high heels and a leather corset.  It was… Yet, we made it past her cruel embrace and now we can run head long into the NEW!

27.)  This is not the last nor the final word on ways to celebrate and get your year off to a good start.  You have to invent your own rituals, create traditions which work for you and your family.  Don’t just do what everybody else does and then feel bad that your life doesn’t work for you.  YOU must tailor your life to meet your needs and cease judging other for not having the same exact values as you.  If we all wanted or were the same person, there really wouldn’t be enough resources for us all to thrive.  There are, yet… it is up to us to learn to use what we have in a way that best works for ourselves and others.

Now, I wish you a solid, worthwhile year. 

I wish you the strength and understanding to know that your year will be whatever you decide to make it.

Go LUCK!  (For Fortuna is a raging whore ready to eat you alive, much like Kronos did his children…)

Big hug, 

Frau Kolb