And I here I thought I was being all unconventional! Last year I celebrated the entrance of the foreboding 2010 by attending a meditation and reflection session at Insight Meditation Center. It was the most enthralling and calming and frustrating experience I’ve had in quite some time; and I learned loads, to boot! It seems, also, that that particular experience shaped 2010 for me and helped me be a little more reflective and, pun intended, insightful.
I thought, as I walked out of the center January 1, 2010, “I need to do this every year!”
As 2010 approached its end, I knew that returning to the meditation center was not going to happen. Not because I didn’t want it to, but because things change and if impermanence is the lesson I am meant to learn, then this was a perfect example.
Like last year, I was invited to a New Year’s Eve party, one that I was both nervous and excited to attend. Nervous because I wouldn’t know anyone there. Excited because I wouldn’t know anyone there. And then, snowpocalypse 2010 hit New York City and the party was cancelled.
And I threw myself unto the floor, fists beating the cold ground, legs kicking, head motioning left and right, “No! No! No!”
Nope. Not at all.
I actually had one of the better celebrations in years (excluding the 2008 NYE party where everybody forgot something at my place). I watched episodes of The Wire, snuggled on the couch with cuddleman; made Risotto alla Milanese and at midnight we opened a bottle of bubbly and cheered in 2011. New Year’s Day saw us go ice skating at Bryant Park, eat Lenticchie e Cotechino.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to admit, there’s a crazy, freckle-faced teenager in me that longs for the excitement and build-up frenzy of the count-down to midnight; but these days she’s content to sit back, relax and watch the show.