Happy New Year

: The goal for the New Year is to write in this thing everyday because, well, I need a goal for the New Year and this at least seems like an attainable one. Actually, I need several goals for the New Year, or at least one grand, overarching one. But right now, this is all I can come up with. Actually it is already a few days late to even begin this project but, well, what are you going to do? I mean, I confront the New Year a completely blank slate: no idea what to do, what to write, where to live. Some might find this exhilarating; I find it exhausting. Plan A had been to be in the Peace Corps by now, and in someway that is still a possibility. That is, the Peace Corps is going to be sending people there sometime on the list and I have been cleared for this mission and am on the list of candidates. The one obstacle standing in the way is that I promised my editor I would be back in the fall when the book is released to do publicity, and I have every intention of keeping that vow. A small possibility exists that the book publication be put off until January, and then that would allow me the possibility of serving in Indonesia. But I am hesitant to request that and it is unlikely to happen if I do (and not guaranteed to happen if I do). Then there is the one year project---a wisdom for all seasons—to wander the globe for a year—primarily China, India and Greece—in search of how classic wisdom traditions are faring in everyday life. This strikes everyone I tell it to as an interesting project, and me too sometimes. At other times it seems overwhelming, expensive and exhausting. But it provides me with a plan and a focus—and that is not something to be lightly discounted. It would start in late February in China, and I would probably leave about a month before to visit friends in Japan and Thailand along the way. It would require me to be back in the States by mid-June for a conference in California and another one in mid-July in Concord, and then in Greece shortly thereafter for one or two conferences there before spending a month in Athens and then back to the States in mid-September for a fall in Concord Massachusetts, heading to a month long Buddhist retreat in Colorado in mid-December and to India for a couple of months once that is finished. I get exhausted just writing about it.