Creativist Society

What’s your theme for the year?

By Olivia Sprinkel

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. For the last four years, I’ve had a theme for the year instead – The year of saying yes, the year of radical change, the year of dancing and flying, the year of Olivia’s Kitchen. And all have delivered on their promise.

Resolutions are made – and then frequently broken, despite our best intentions. The advantage of having a theme for the year is that it creates a space. It acts as a guide. It provides a framework for making choices in – does this choice fit in with my theme for the year? It acts as an attractor, an inspiration – I find that as soon as I name it, I begin to be drawn toward it, things occur which fit in with that theme.

When I tell people about my theme for the year, they ask how I choose it. I find that it is not so much about choosing, but about listening. About listening to what you need from the year. And listening to the words that come up inside of you that might make that real for you, which really speak to you. For example the year of radical change was originally the year of change – I added radical as I felt that I needed that extra ‘oomph’, and it did turn out to be a year of radical change in ways I couldn’t have imagined. The year of dancing and flying didn’t originally include dancing – but then I realized that I needed my feet moving on the ground as well as my head in the air.

So, my theme for 2011? The year of abundance. My initial idea was the year of arrival. I wanted to capture the sense of arrival in every moment. I am done with the searching, the quest, the striving, the always looking. I want to be present in every moment – awake, alive and aware, as my friend Veena put it. But arrival had the downside of finality, like I had reached my destination – and I am still journeying.

And then I was on the phone to Veena and the idea of abundance came up, and I knew immediately that was it. I had an image in my mind of a harvest scene, fields of golden, ripened corn, an apple-cheeked woman in her apron, her arm’s full of nature’s bounty – the full-on cliché, in other words. But a key part of it was that her arms were so full, she couldn’t help but share what she had. We so often focus on what we don’t have, that we lose sight of what we do have – and what we have to share, whether that it is our love, our creativity or our joy.

Abundance for me is not about having more in the consumer sense. It is about the abundance to be found in everyday life, in every moment, in the connections and relationships that we have with others. And it is about sharing the abundance of what we have – and the abundance that comes from sharing. I am convinced that the more that we focus on abundance, then paradoxically we will be happier with less stuff.

I would love to hear what your theme for the year is. And here’s to an abundant 2011.