I’m heading a little bit out of my comfort zone this weekend and feeling a little bit dazed at myself. I’m going out of town with a new friend to spend a couple of days with friends of hers who are complete strangers to me. For someone as shy as I am that’s quite a feat. I might as well casually remark that I’m going to fire walk on my lunch hour or take a shot at Mt Everest with no training. Someone reminded me recently that my word for 2012 is OPEN, and I realize that without meaning to I’ve opened myself to a lot of new experiences lately: saying “yes” to invitations from strangers to meet for coffee; taking an oil painting class; agreeing to lead a workshop; going out to dinner with a man I met in a bar. Once I picked the word OPEN, I forgot all about it. But my subconscious didn’t, and it keeps finding ways for me to walk through doorways before I can find reasons not to. And then I’m completely astonished that I’ve agreed to something out of character and outside the circumscribed little world I’ve created for myself. Open sesame — come find the treasure.

Since I picked CHANGE as my word for 2010, I’ve learned to be  more specific in what I ask for from the universe. When I chose it, I thought of Change in terms of new career and creative opportunities, kind of a lite life-makeover that might be accomplished in a couple of workshops, something about as dangerous as kittens or cupcakes. Instead I got Change that cracked me open and left me wondering who I am, who I was, who I will be. I got Change that picked me up like Dorothy’s tornado and set me down in an alien country where I don’t speak the language. I got Change that makes me feel like a stranger to myself when I wake up in the morning. Sometimes I think numbing down my life was better, even though all it did was create a constant re-icing of my soul until something triggered a furious glacial meltdown, drowning all the defenses I’d spent decades building, washing away years of saying “I’ll be fine” whenever something bad happened. Today someone told me that when grief strips you bare, down to the bone, when you think you have nowhere left to go (and I doubt it was mere chance that led me to notice this sign for the first time on a street I drive every day!)–that’s when real change can occur. Maybe someday I’ll be thankful for this painful opportunity to metamorphose, and it’s felicitous that Uranus in the form of positive, revolutionary, happy-trickster change will soon be transiting my planets. But in the meantime, I think I will be very careful about the word I choose for 2011, because  it seems the universe is actually paying attention.

Today I did something totally out of character — I went to the gym on a Saturday afternoon, not for a class, but just to walk/run on the treadmill. I hate the gym, and the only time I go there is to do my weekly spinning classes, and I only do that because I’m trying to be healthier and because I decided that I’d focus on exercising instead of trying to force ideas. Yes, I still hate the gym (can they make them any grayer, any drabber, any more dank?), but I’m entranced with the fact that I actually did something very un-me, so my word of the day is Open. It’s only when I do something so 180 that I realize that I’ve let the path I’m traveling on get narrow and restricting. How will you startle yourself today?

I never really completely understood what yoga teachers meant when they said to make an intention for your class before beginning your class, but since I made “change” my intention and mantra for 2010, eerie things have happened. Not only have some cool opportunities come my way that I would never have dreamt of a year ago, but also I think I’ve changed in subtle ways that helped bring them into my path. It’s not that I’ve deliberately changed the way I act, like when George decided to do the opposite of what he would normally do on Seinfield, but I think I’ve expanded my reach by reaching out to strangers in ways I wouldn’t have before. Simply because the word “change” is always quietly humming in the back of my mind now. I keep coming back to the idea that the plans I make have been too small for my life, because there are some possibilities and dreams that just don’t enter my mind– either because I don’t think I have the skills or credibility to aim so high or because of a failure of imagination. This is the first time I’ve ever chosen a word for the year and actually maintained my commitment to it for more than a couple of weeks, and I’m tentatively amazed at the results. Sweet dreams.