My Year of (R)EVOLUTION
How many different interpretations of this word can you think of?
(R) E V O L U T I O N
It’s my guiding force for this year, and I want to share a bit about what it means to me and how I arrived at it.
I came to this word through a series of exercises Anne Ditmeyer guided us through in the Mapping Your Path Into 2022 workshop & community, which helped me corral my perennial driving-but-vague desire for turn-of-the-year reflection. Among the helpful ways I made that vague desire more concrete this year was a lot more intention around this idea of a word for 2022.
I’m jazzed about my word this year, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I want this nested set of ideas to guide my year ahead. So, how did I get there?
The first words that came to me as I started thinking about my guiding force were KALEIDOSCOPE and TAPESTRY. I want this year ahead to be one where I lean into collectivity and let myself be guided by communally-focused decisions (What’s the path I can take that’s best for the most people? How can I contribute to the communities I’m a part of? Where are places that others may need or benefit from this situation more than me?). Both KALEIDOSCOPE and TAPESTRY made me think of many parts making up a whole, of crafting a beautiful thing out of small, intentionally chosen elements.
When I free-associated with these words, KALEIDOSCOPE was giving me a magically tingling sense of excitement with its promises of serendipitous adventure and order/chaos and spinning, whirling, new perspectives with every shift. TAPESTRY felt warm and slow and thoughtful, infused with care, attentive to the making and building of something new, a unifying whole that could only exist out of pieces carefully combined.
Hold that thought. I’ll come back to kaleidoscopes and tapestries.
I’ve been approaching my work through a lens of CHANGE for years now, but over the course of 2021, that solidified into a concrete desire to make my work as an independent arts and culture professional (someone who can work with museums but isn’t bounded by their limits) focus specifically on change. I want to work with people and organizations who are committed to doing things differently. I want to help people create online spaces that don’t feel isolating; to have necessary, uncomfortable conversations across difference; to create work environments that include room for humanity and flexibility.
So, while CHANGE is a guiding force for me, it’s been solidly rooted in what I do for years. It didn’t feel like it brought the right sort of zap and specificity to resonate as the guiding force for my 2022.
Coming back to KALEIDOSCOPE and TAPESTRY, then.
I kept noodling around these words and the associations I was making with them. My desire for a combination of the electric, energetic movement of the kaleidoscope and the considered, intentional, visible soft strength of the tapestry. How I wanted room for change that could feel surprising, dynamic, swift and embodied, slow, evolving. And how fired up I am about all of this. That had to be captured in there somewhere, too. I’m as ready for an upheaval in how our arts institutions exist as I’ve ever been in my life.
This was the brainstorming visualization I was working through when I first hit on a word that felt to me like it encapsulated all of that.
(R)EVOLUTION
To me, this word says change while leaving room for multiple possibilities. It says tear-down-the-Bastille radicalism and steadfast growth over time. It says spinning something on its head to see it from a new perspective, and it says changing form until things look entirely new. It includes room for power, the energetic force that keeps things moving and power, the quiet dedication that wears away stubborn resistance bit by bit.
It’s change as a lightning bolt and as a slow drip of water on rock.
When I hit on this word, an internal bell rang inside me that it was right.
One of the things I find most helpful in brainstorming is a chance to get creative with words and images, so when one of the mapping exercises in Mapping Your Path was to create a map of our 2022 guiding force, I was off to the races. Anne has blogged about her process of doing these each year since 2020, and seeing her 2021 map for her Year of Audacity was one of the first things that excited me about joining her workshops.
I got out my trusty Pentel markers and Muji pens and got to work. I wanted my map to include the things I’ve shared here and to indicate the connecting roads between them. There are core values I am trying to uphold, and questions I am trying to ask myself as I move into this next phase of my life. All of those should have a home on my map, too. My curiosity and exploration and seeking needed a presence, as did my anger, as did my increasing need for quiet. I added little doodles of some somatic and ritual things that are bringing me comfort (Boy Smells candles, a renewal of my joy in reading, dancing even as my body changes what it allows me to do, and little Lila’s soft puppy ears).
I made this map all in one sitting. It took me about an hour and a half. It gives me such a deeply satisfying sense of clarity and purpose and contentment to look at it. And it has helped me frame how I want to move forward in a moment where I—along with oh, so many others—am deeply questioning that very thing.
The original version of this map sits in front of me as I type this right now. The digital scan of it is my computer’s wallpaper. I had a ring made by Caitlyn Minimalist of my guiding force in my own handwriting.
I’m keeping this guiding force in my heart and in front of my eyes.
2021 was my year of AUTHENTICITY, and it was. a. journey. Perhaps I’ll share some of that journey of un/learning in future posts.
2022 will be my year of (R)EVOLUTION. I’m excited to see where it’ll take me.
One way you can join me on this (r)evolution is by signing up for my monthly Interchange virtual workshop series. Each month will be guided by a different theme and will be a participatory 2-hour experience of mutual sharing within a small group. The first of these is Interchange: Care & Keeping (Feb 10, 2-4pm EST), and you can register at my website. I would love to see you there!
Creative Prompt Coda from Spark Creativity from Chronicle Books: Collect advice from 3 creative heroes and do the opposite.
