Welcome to My Rippling Year
(if you want a peek into my brain, I’ll tell you that I’ve been listening to Caroline Polachek recently, and I’m hearing “Welcome to my rippling” to the refrain of “Welcome to My Island [link] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Maybe it’s fitting to start off this first post of 2024 with a peek into my odd, clever, eclectic, much-appreciated brain, because that’s one of the things at the center of who I am and what I do, and as I noodled over my word for 2024, centering was a major component of it.
The word I’m centering for 2024 is RIPPLING. Styled as ((rippling)) for the ring I had made… get it… it ripples with parentheses.
Here’s what RIPPLING evokes for me, care of a free-writing session around this word that I share here, unedited.
Ripples reach out to new shores. They’re uncontrollable once you set them in motion. They come from you and then carry on into the unknown. They travel gracefully and with predictable patterns.
In rippling, there is a sonic sensorial pleasure. Say it slowly. Enjoy the consonants. Move your fingers along with the word.
Ripples make change gently and from small beginnings. They can’t happen alone. Rippling is a collective enterprise, and it touches more than it starts with. More than its source can ever know.
Let go the need to control outcome and take initial action, knowing it will lead somewhere new. Begin with what’s in front of you.
Tendrils will permeate organically.
Resonance will echo and diffuse.
Swirls will reverberate.
Eddies will return.
Rippling begins in chaos and develops into order. It contains both growth and natural fading. It is impermanent and beautiful.
Much as my centered brain would very much like me to make some edits to the above, I’m passing it on without changes, because the centering is only one component of the ripples. Just as my brain is only one component of how I encounter the world, the concept of what I’m centering isn’t the only place I want my focus to be in my rippling year.
With much gratitude to Anne Ditmeyer for the inspiration, I approach each year’s word with an accompanying question. This year’s question?
What is my center & what am I spreading?
The spreading is actually the key component of rippling in my mind. No matter what may be tossed into a body of water to splash and instigate ripples, it’s those outward-reaching rings that take the initial burst of energy and spread it, gentle it, permeate it through and into what is nearby.
The center is the catalyst, and the spreading is the magic of transformative diffusion.
Because the spreading is the part that’s completely beyond my control, and that’s also why I’ve chosen this word for my year. I want to let my sweet, strange little brain cook things up and help make them happen, but then I want to let go of maintaining control once those things have been splashed out into the world. I want to trust that the spreading ripples will carry that energy in their own directions, out to unknown new shores.
The ripple’s energy, after all, is eventually subsumed into its watery host, and the fluidity of water to travel freely is part of how I like to envision my impact spreading: organically and into other un-dreamed-of forms.
I frequently use a metaphor in my teaching of strewing seeds. Not planting them per se, but casting out handfuls into the soil without knowing which ones will take root. I think of these seeds I strew as wildflowers, and I like not knowing what’s going to grow or where it may land to do it.
My rippling year is a year I’m hoping to lean into that spirit of openhearted trust. That I can cast out my energy and teaching into the watery world with a satisfying plunk-SPLOOSH, and then leave it to work its magic wherever and however it will.
Here’s the map I’ve made as another of my guidance tools (its physical version is mounted at my desk, and it’s also scanned and saved as my computer wallpaper). And the vision board I collaged around what rippling evokes for me.
I’ve been joking of late that the unofficial, tongue-in-cheek motto of consultants could be Don’t care. Don’t have to.
By which I mean we don’t have to be subsumed into aligning our identities with the nitty-gritty details of every org we work for.
By which I mean we can save the energy we might have otherwise needed to spend on internal politics for spreading our work across a broader sphere.
By which I don’t mean—to be clear—that we don’t or shouldn’t care about the work we’re doing or the orgs we’re working with.
It’s the impish playfulness of this idea that accompanies my rippling vision. I refer to my work as catalyzing change in arts and culture. Once catalyzed, I want that change to ripple out and beyond me to wider waters. I’m happy to be the person now who can step into a fraught situation, draw out some of the underlying toxicity, and take it away with me, leaving behind more fertile ground. Ground I don’t need to come back to monitor.
Because I don’t need to center that toxicity. None of us need to. For me, it’s easier to remember that as an independent culture worker. But it’s worth remembering for all of us who are also still working toward change inside the institutions we want to shift.
None of us need to center toxicity.
That’s not what I’d ever recommend tossing into the water to start a new chain of ripples.
Instead, I’ve given myself some rough guides and phrases for each quarter of what I want to center and what I want to spread throughout my rippling year. Q1 here is about centering reflection and spreading ease. It’s guided by sense of measured open attention.
I’m aiming to model change catalyzing that, yes, has room for fire and electricity, and that also holds space for listening and quiet contemplation. None of us want to spend our lives in agonized struggle. The inequitable realities of the world mean that’s not always possible, and that struggle and agony fall unjustly on some shoulders more than others. A glance around the earth in 2024 offers plenty of causes for righteous anger and vociferous, active protest.
But even with all of that, as we start this new calendar year off, I’m hoping to help serve as a reminder that where we can find ease among the chaos, we don’t need to justify embracing it. We can also use gentle metaphors for our change-making work.
We can stretch new leaves toward the sun around light-blocking obstacles in our paths.
We can work through dark and hard griefs to accept decay as making room for what comes next.
We can change and grow as spreading ripples that expand to include those around us.
Here’s to a 2024 of gentle, inexorable, rippling change.
Here’s to some focus on what we center, and what we’re spreading.
Creative Prompt Coda: Take some time to plot out for yourself what ideas you want to center and what ideas you want to spread throughout this year.
