Possibilities

January 2012 offers new goals.  Some aims will stick; some won’t make it to Valentine’s Day.  I elected five years ago to choose a theme for my year and let the promises arise as less of a punitive act.  Monday Morning Musing is a promise from January 2011 that I kept.   Intended to flex my writing muscles and start each week with written words the blog has become a habit.  I am hoping to add even more writing habits to my daily life in 2012 as I say goodbye to 2011, the year of fabulous (see post January 2011), and hello to my 2012 theme, possibilities.

Merriam Webster online shows the following definitions for possibility.

1.       The condition of being possible

2.       (archaic) one’s utmost power, capacity or ability

3.       Something that is possible

4.       Potential or prospective value – usually used in plural

2012 has some unsteady variables for many of us.  Our finances may be changing, technology is most certainly changing, where we live may be changing, the work we do may need to differ, the way we use resources needs to change.  And let’s not forget messages about the end of the world.

I have not ability to predict the future.  I know we cannot know what is ahead with certainty at any time.  But I do discern the reality of imagining possibilities.  This phrase came into my thinking spot from a workshop I attended in December.  We played a sort of game with a path.  At certain junctions along the route of the game we were presented with statements and were to choose which most accurately described us or appealed to us at that moment.  Eventually the winding lane of choices led to an ending phrase or thought.  There was no way of losing - every player won!  But, there also was no skipping onto the path not chosen.  Once a direction was picked then the path NOT chosen was, well, off limits.  Players only picked from choices on their path followed.

And isn’t that the way life is?  Ask Robert Frost in The Road Not Taken.  In life moments we decide with whatever resources are available to us – mentally, emotionally and otherwise.  That just has to be okay.  It is an inherent part of possibilities.  Possibilities rest in where we are.  They are not in the past.  They live in today.  Today offers choices.  And then tomorrow becomes today and we look again at the prospects.  Possibilities may be difficult or easy, pleasant or unpleasant but I imagine them as limitless.

Prospects

Dare see boundless measure

breathing, bending, reaching.

Teaching work that is then becomes

beyond to what might, found or lost

eaten or passed, odds

owe only the chance

ends, frog kissing, signs missing.

Capacity untouched heart beating

a dead horse with a whip

given long ago and only

released grows a new miner

ambling into town wielding words

rhymes trickling through

the first expression of possibilities.