As 2016 approached I began to think about what I might write for the new year, which then prompted me to think about resolutions. I didn’t want to write something trite – the cheerleading blight that I can’t stand to read. But, I started thinking about the word “resolution” and in my musings realized its link to the the word “resolve.” Then the word resolve parted for me – breaking into Re & Solve and I got it!

The resolutions we so easily leave behind us as the year moves on are related to those things we need to figure out, embrace, learn or change. We often re-visit those things in our lives, sometimes year after year, until we get it: until we’ve solved the puzzle.

I felt intrigued to think about what it is that I am currently trying to re-solve. Here’s my short list:

• How to laugh more with my two sons
• How to deal with aging and not be fearful of death
• How to stay away from the lure of my phone and computer screen
• How to best use the class and educational privilege I hold in service of equity and justice

Some of these I’ve been re-solving for several years (technology’s pull; responding meaningfully to the vast inequity in the world) and others are more recent (death; laughter). I’m in the process of thinking about what the pieces are to the puzzle for each of these and how they might be linked – if at all.

What are you re-solving this year? What’s the puzzle in front of you? How do the pieces fit together?

Take a minute to write down one thing you want to re-solve this year and then think about it like a jigsaw puzzle – look at the components to what’s calling for your attention and then play around with the pieces over and over until you get a “snap”!

It might take years or an epiphany might come in the pre-dawn hours or in the shower. Whenever it arrives – welcome it with a smile and an open heart – for those are the moments that propel us to the next step in the journey we’re each dreaming.

May your 2016 be enlightening,

Maria

I remember the moment it happened.  I was in an elementary school art class and the teacher – a woman with strawberry blonde, disheveled curls – gave us a large sheet of tan construction paper and a crayon and told us to put the crayon on the paper, close our eyes and draw.  When we opened our eyes we were to examine our creation and decide what it was.   Mine was a man delivering a pizza in a box.  That was the last time I remember being satisfied with a drawing of mine. [Read more…]

Where does inspiration come from?  I wonder about this as I notice an idea energize me or a string of words in my head turn into a poem.  Often I feel something stirring inside my stomach – kind of like the whirling of a small ball of energy and if I pay attention to it, it often lets me know there is something brewing that I need to bring to the fore.  When I wrote my novel, Rosie’s Blues, the inspiration came from a woman I had seen on the streets many years before.  Her appearance struck me because she was dressed in all white – and I was captivated by the way she walked slowly down the street, clearly in distress, yet almost ghostly in her appearance.  I never forgot her and ten years later she became the voice for the protagonist in my novel.  She stirred something in me and that is currently one of the ways I understand inspiration. [Read more…]

When I heard Robert Gass, co-founder of Rockwood Leadership Institute, explain the difference between change and transformation – it was a powerful moment of clarity for me.  “When you undergo a true transformation,” he shared, “you never go back to the way you were.  So many organizational and personal change efforts fail,” he continued, “because people only pay attention to one or two areas of the wheel of change (hearts and minds/structures/behaviors), but don’t fully address all three.” [Read more…]