The Cycle Rolls Over

I do not make New Year's resolutions. I have considered them, but the way I figure, if there is something I was not going to do then I was unlikely to do it merely because the date changed.

I tend not to perform a focused reflection on the past year either. I am constantly looking back at my life. It's just not normally in a compartmentalized way such as placing events in boxes marked by years. In fact, I rarely put the past away at all. I simply leave it open like a festering wound to watch it turn green over time as I focus on it and seldom address the past in a meaningful way other than to permit it to depress me and attribute to my inaction in the future. Maybe this is something I should try.

2015 opened strong for me. My body was responding well to my commands. 2014 closed strong for me as well. Physically speaking, I had a strong three or so months at the start of the year. I was in physical therapy, but it was mostly focused on getting some range of motion into my left arm as I injured my shoulder in 2014 and it healed wonky. It makes it kind of hard to get around when one arm does not want to behave. I still work on my legs and abdomen some, but physical therapy in those areas had stopped previously because it is more about maintaining what little flexibility I have there rather than trying to get me to walk again which is hard to get insurance to pay for.

Fast forward to right now, the changeover between December and January. I have not been in the bathtub since November. I bathe. I merely have not done it in the tub. I'm a bit much for anybody else to manhandle if I can't brute force myself around with my arms. I had a couple of weeks where I was unable to get out of my room. The rest of the year had been some state between these two that varied from month to month and day to day.

I had not done any painting since November either. I did some filing and knife work on some models the past couple of days as I am on a minor uptick compared to the rest of the month. The work was clunky and slow, but it felt good to be working with my hands. I can not do detail work right now, and I might have to go back and reclean what I am working on, but it feels right to have a tool in my hand and a task on my mind.

I considered possible New Year's resolutions last year. One of those was to paint more. I decided that I was going to paint whatever I was going to paint. I painted fewer models overall in 2015 than I had in 2014, but I probably spent a comparable amount of time painting in both years. It was probably a little less time in 2015, but I am happy with my hobby focus this year.

I had a wonderful project handed to me in either April or May I want to say. I have been giving it my all. This particular project was for a person I respect so I wanted to be better than what I felt I was capable of. The problem with a project like this is that I was constantly learning while working on it. It took long enough to where I wanted to continuously go back and apply what I have learned while I was still working on it. The project is a mix of half-baked ideas and lies unfinished next to me as I type this. It is still my primary project.

2015 was also a year where I had personally seen a lot of fear or hate in others. Sometimes both at the same time. Most people treat me relatively well. I guess that is part of being obviously handicapped in today's world. It's hard to believe sometimes that an individual that had treated me with kindness might not do the same for other strangers. It had been building for years, but 2015 was the year where it finally clicked for me that these feelings of hate and fear were not regulated to far right or left extremists nor the mentally imbalanced.

 

2015 has been a year when many people have decided they are tired of hurting or seeing others be hurt. While they might not know what action to take, some people are ready to take any action if they think it has even a slight chance to offer immediate relief. The cost can be paid later.

Like many, I have opinions. This blog is the place I share them if I put them out there at all. I tend to keep my opinions to myself. This is a little bit because I don't want to offend anybody unnecessarily. I do not mind offending people, but I always fret over it later if I did not do so intentionally. The primary reason I do not share my opinions often is because my opinions do not matter. They do not matter because I do not act upon them in a meaningful way. Signing petitions, speaking out on social media, talking to those around me about my opinions might make me feel better, but it does nothing to address the situation itself. This is not how one changes the world. I have some ideas for how to make some impact, but I have trouble justifying to myself that I have the right to conduct myself in such a manner nor that my opinions are necessarily the best ones to be acted upon.

The louder I am about my opinions, the more it sends out the unintended message that I don't want to hear what those I disagree with have to say. I most emphatically do want to know and understand why people make the choices they end up on. If I stop considering the opinions of those I disagree with, then I lose the ability to question my own opinion on any given subject.

There are rarely two sides involved in a dispute. There is evidence to support a wide array of options. It is all too easy for me to lump people into groups based on one expressed opinion when they might not fit there. There may be groups I am completely unaware exist because they are not obvious to me or are never acknowledged openly. The world is not divided into good and evil. Everybody picks where they stand for a reason, and their reason is generally a good one or at least the lesser evil in their opinion.

There are valid reasons for people to feel the way that they do. Just because I disagree with them does not invalidate their feelings nor the steps they took to arrive at that point. People worry too much about being right when it comes to feeling a certain way. It is okay to feel absolutely anything at all. There is no need to justify the way one feels. Feel what you feel whether you want it or not. Try not to let your feelings completely dictate your actions and the rightness of a feeling does not matter. It's funny that people ask if they are right to feel a certain way, but rarely ask if they are correct to feel a certain way. It's probably because even though they mean it to sound like they are asking if they are correct, that is not what they are asking. We look for evidence that supports our feelings, and that evidence is almost always there in all cases for each of us which makes it easier to justify feelings that never needed justified in the first place if we do not base our actions that matter on feelings.

So there is my overview of 2015 from where I sit enclosed by four walls with a magical box that lets me take peeks at the surface level of the rest of the world. I still have no resolutions for the coming year. I will continue doing what I have done in the past. I will paint when I can, play when I can, observe what I can, feel everything I can.