Evaluations of 2012

Now I have done the countdown and the recap, time to evaluate my personal growth.  What, on a blog?  Well, not really, only in the sense that we can all spend some time in personal contemplation and looking at one’s own personal belief in self and who one really is.  What do I mean?  If you are getting up there in years you should have a sense of who you are – or at least who you have been all these decades but sometimes you need to look in the proverbial mirror.

       Interestingly I was rereading a Leslie Ford novel this morning that was all about Hollywood (by way of murder) and one of the characters talked about how dense the jealousy was in the 10 square miles that was Hollywood.  I stopped to reflect on what I have believed of myself for years, namely that I don’t have a jealous bone in my body.  Then I took a quiet double take and asked myself “is that really true”?  So here I am, laying it bare to all and sundry, I think I actually do have a jealous bone in my body.  I thought about it a little bit more, about jealousy in general because I was uncomfortable with the thought of me in particular.  When one is 20 the world lies before you like so much tundra, ready to cross over for miles and miles but approaching 60 that world has shrunk in considerably from the point of view of Possibilities.  So yes, in a sense I can feel a twinge of jealousy when I hear that some young person has pulled up stakes and moved to New Zealand or Sri Lanka or Ecuador.  Perhaps it isn’t quite jealousy but envy mixed with admiration, in any event sometimes it does feel like a negative sensation which is uncomfortable and not like the me that I thought I was.

       That’s just an example of what we believe in ourselves because we have believed it so long – but at some point have we lost touch with ourselves and who we are or who we want to be?  So over the next couple of days I am going to let my mother psychoanalyze me (that in itself should be interesting as this is very much out of her comfort zone) along with my own self contemplation because naturally I think she is interested in her oldest child’s development!  Some questions to be asked:  Am I loyal?  Am I fair?  Am I honest?  Am I open minded?  These are some of the qualities which I have always believed defined me so it will be interesting to figure out if they are still true.