7:30 BELLS: Radically Rapt: 2105 New Year’s Manifesto

For a double dose of New Beginnings/Old Endings have your birthday four days after New Year’s— January 4th. Hence the second annual 730 BELLS New Year’s Manifesto.

This year, I will step up creating the kind of luminous life I want to live. How? By choosing how I attend to the world. Our experience of life, psychologically, biologically, spiritually, is determined by what we choose to pay attention to. Check out RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher for more on the psychology and neuroscience of attention.

The trick is finding not only what you want to pay attention to, but also how. Your unique way of looking at the world provides all you need to understand how to walk through the world in order to create the best life, work, experience of being alive---best for you.

For me, paying daily attention to the natural world is core. Watching trees. The slant of rain. The way the wind is blowing the light around the sky. Not only does the natural world bring out the best in my work and heart, it’s the foundation stone of who I am. It brings me most alive. I pay attention to the natural world by making art with and about it. A deeply interior conversation has developed. A dynamic luminous relationship that flows from me to the world and back again.

Other things are important, too. The face across the table from me instead of the icon on the social networking app. This year I will pay even less attention to the “Information Overload Age.” Listen less to news, radio. Spend even less time looking at FB and Twitter links.

With a new year and a birthday , I’m increasingly aware that I don’t have time to pay attention to the endless onslaught of information. I don’t want to. And regardless of contemporary credo, I don’t need to. All I need do to create the experience of luminous life I want is to be. . . Radically Rapt. To Radically Ring.

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.

7:30 BELLS Guest Posts run on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month. Join me on January 14 for a guest post with author Nikki Grimes.