New Decision: Move The Human Heart

Happy New Year! It’s 2014!

It’s just another day but sometimes the new year is like shedding old skin so I wish you all a glowing Happy 2014!!

Dionne Warwick sings, Keep smiling, keep shining, knowing you can always ____
This is where we fill in the gaps of what we’ll like to do more of in 2014.

Something shifted in me when I understood  that – Decisions Takes Us Places. Decisions not Resolutions. 
Decisions come from our core filter, the colors of our glasses, some have a rose-tint, they put a positive spin on everything and have a confident expectation of good.
Others wear smudged lens, cracked and unclear giving desperation and fear room to wrap its vicious tentacles around their hopes, choking everything, killing dreams.

Today, my decision to get down to my local library on Darby Avenue to clear my outstanding balance of $9.80 from returning  two Money magazines and Abiku by Debo Kotun (Winner of the 1995 Phi Kappa Phi Prize for Fiction, USC), led me to my decision for this new year and the book – Unless It Moves the Human Heart.

On a lighter note, this book should be required reading for any writing student, especially if you ever want to know what’s going on behind your professor’s rimmed glasses and the sardonic look he shot in your direction.

Roger Rosenblatt, an esteemed, distinguished author and professor of the craft and art of writing, wrote this concise book   – a memoir of teaching – about one semester in his “Writing Everything” class at Stony Brook University. It’s new year’s eve and I can’t put the book down!

The most profound question of the book is  – Why write?

“Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue.” Roger Rosenblatt

Here are my questions – Why Live?  Can writing help?  Yes,  because its intrinsic power helps to get our sores, dreams and plans unto paper, a journal, a note pad etc. It helps to crystallize the issues we deal with or things we are grateful and hopeful for.

We are all eager to be done with 2013. We ignore her crestfallen face, her trampled emotions as we callously divorce ourselves from its pain and she whispers, “Come on…surely we had some good times.” But we don’t even pause to offer a – “I ma holler at you later!”  She’s old dead skin and we want out of it.

Professor Rosenblatt is right, sometimes living feels like a disease… and we get sick of it. Some give up, others decide to find the reason go on. We revel in a new season to start over. The air feels fresher, the fireworks illuminate the dark parts of the sky ignored by the stars, we hug strangers and kiss loved ones. We get to hope again, serenading the new year – Baby…Please be good to me!

I am very thankful for my 2013 and all the highs and the lows but this new year, I want to PRESS IN. So I’ll keep smiling, keep shining, grateful for another season to give thanks, love, read, write, learn to be patient with the process, myself and life. I can always bless more, pray more, cry more, laugh more and above all move some hearts.

Everything else is vanity and inconsequential, unless it moves the human heart.

From the T.V in my living room, The IMPACT NYE Bash is ushering in the new year and the Sidewalk Prophets are yelling  – “Nothing, Nothing’s gonna stop us! ” 

It’s 2014! I gotta go…

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Prompt: What would you like to do more of in 2014?