On New Year’s Day 2010, I decided to write not a resolution, but a manifesto. I wanted to set in motion ways of being that would sustain me for the entire year. Looking back over what has been a phenomenal year for me, it seems to have worked. It has been a year of transformation and success. I will certainly take the trouble to write another for 2011.

I dedicated the past year to honing, investing, and cutting. And what I see now is that it has been a sharpening of the instrument, a subtle but deep change in how I create and how I relate. It’s changed how I make what I make with words and it’s changed what I do with the words that flow through me. It’s changed the nature of how I interact with friends and how I conduct business.

As I begin to compose my thoughts for the coming year, I intend to preserve this year’s momentum, but also infuse it with new energies. I will still not leave behind any of the fundamental inspiration with which I launched 2010. So I repeat it, and thank all of the good fortune and good people in the world that have allowed me to live it. May this and every year treat all of you as well.

Now is the time to hone my compassion, my creativity, and my focus. It is a time to transform gifts that I have into gifts that I give, a time to depose petty urgencies from the throne of true priorities. 

I will invest more into the essence of what I have to offer: articulating and sharing insights, seeing and creating ways, connecting, forging paths to peace, saying effects as a making of causes. At core, delivering sentences, with all the nuances and multiple meanings that such a phrase suggests. 

And I will cut, piece by piece, the worry, the fear, and the sour harmony that comes from false accommodations. I will leave behind nothing but the bare core of what I believe and value, because with every increment of calendar and clock, there’s less time left.

— January 1, 2010