2020Thrive
Begin as you mean to continue.
This was a phrase I learned from a yoga student in the first 200 hour teacher training I created and led for myoga in 2009. She picked it up somewhere and, while I haven’t researched its origins, I do love its emphasis on clarity in whatever is originated.
How we begin anything is how it manifests or unfolds into felt reality. Or, at the very least, heavily influences the flavor of its eventuation.
In addition to not having my time fully as my own lately, I’ve also been mulling the best way to begin this Gregorian calendar year, at least in terms of my first Substack post. I’ve been watching all the bright, hopeful greetings fly between folks the past 10 days and sensing the underlying fatigue and bewilderment that’s ironically leading to their exchanges. And also monitoring my own responses.
At the local organic market the young cashier said she’d heard 2025 called 2020Thrive and I immediately resonated with the wordplay. I popped that into my filter last week and have been watching it sift through my consciousness and my interactions with others. How does this idea of thriving play out in each moment?
By trusting the longer journey I’m better able to experience spaciousness, to make room for more room, in and around my activities.
I need to do this now to accommodate my mother’s slower pace and the increase of communications required to co-navigate, as I attempt to indicate the how, why, where and when of my usual solo show MO. I don’t realize just how much I pack into a day until I’m having to unpack to prepare someone else for the plan and/or pull some things out all together because they won’t be able to keep up with my pace.
I have all ways valued my solitude, even as a small child. And I have also generally felt that very, very few people understood this introverted INFJ neurosparkly (or however you want to label it) need to not be influenced by the energies of others. The only way I can truly return to centre is alone. Then I can carry that centredness out into the tugs and pokes and interminglings that inevitably, usually unconsciously, happen with other energy fields. Animals, water, trees, plants, even children, are all easier than adults, most of whom are enculturated to particular mores of behaviour, on top of being overwhelmed and overwrought by energy influxes themselves.
This video (which I reckon is better listened to than watched) with Joe Dispenza was very reassuring of the quantum evolutionary leaps that can be made in women who live alone.
To be honest, I have always held two seemingly contradictory visions of my life. One in which I love having (a) child/ren, and one in which I relish and prosper from the autonomy of time that comes of living alone. There has always been so much I want to explore, and after years of establishing the practices that reground and centre me, I resist any interference with the ways in which I live and thrive.
So, while I grieve not having a child in this lifetime, I celebrate the thriving into adulthood I have been able to do with that spare parenting energy. I have been my own child and, just maybe, one day soon, I’ll be able to humbly claim the rare feat of reaching the realm of Human Adulthood.
So, like I said, that video was reassuring to me, given the difficult choice I made to not have a child on my own — not having met the mate I wanted to have a child with — and just for the sake of having a child while my body could. While I generally trust my instincts, intuitions and inner whisperings, it is still reassuring to me — in the way that science is so often reassuring to mind-based folks — to have some data, proof, and evidence-based research or reasoning to validate the choices I’ve made.
I accept that now — that some level of (seeming) objectivity is part of how modern man operates — and that’s why I’m in grad school at this time in my life. If the only way you’ll hear what it is I’ve been trying to say in so many other ways, and for decades, is through this lens of science, then bring it.
Saying that, now that I’m here and heavily steeped in conflagrant conversations fueled by curiosity about experiments, evidence, hypotheses, extensive reviews of the scientific literature, etc. etc., I wonder why I didn’t return to academia sooner. I just love learning. I love the inquiry that starts with, “Why?” I love the necessary dropping of judgment and shift into assessment that’s required to widen one’s gaze. To a Sag Rising it’s like travel on an intellectual level.
Seeing one’s own paradigm more fully comes with the contrast, and even conflict, from facing into another paradigm.
As a blade of the human grass, I cannot thrive if all my juice is going to the sustenance and evolution of anOther. Having clarified what I need to thrive, I absorb what supports thriving-ness, both from within and without, and without over-taking more than is necessary. I don’t want to be what the Lakota call a wašíču, a taker of the fat, because even as much as I stand alone, I also realize I cannot survive as one lone blade of grass.
I need all my fellow upright standing blades. We are One, and the same.
One of the ways that keeps me Me, and in a sane way, is to investigate origins. I adore etymology. It was the first app I ever put on my devices, that’s how much I love wriggling down the laneways of word trails. Like comets, they carry us through spacetime and indicate a bit of where and when we’ve been, by how the words we use to convey our journey have, they themselves, evolved.
late 12c., thriven, "to prosper, flourish; grow, increase, mature," from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse þrifask "to thrive," originally "grasp to oneself," probably reflexive of þrifa "to clutch, grasp, grip, take hold of" (compare Norwegian triva "to seize," Swedish trifvas, Danish trives "to thrive, flourish"), of unknown origin. Related: Thrived (or throve); thriving; thriven(as an adjective, "advanced in growth").
So I was intrigued to see the origins of the English word ‘thrive’ coming from one patch of human grassblades in the far north. This immediately reminded me of an eco post I read this morning on how the Finnish are leading the way in thriving. A circular economy requires a rewiring of how we perceive success and prosperity.
thriving (adj.)
"prosperous, successful," especially in business, c. 1600, present-participle adjective from thrive(v.). Related: Thrivingly.
Part of traversing word trails is the multiplicity of it. I go down the thrive lane and it leads me to at least 4 other paths in thriving, prosper, flourish, mature and thrift.
thrift (n.)
c. 1300, "fact of thriving, condition of one who thrives," also "vigor, energy, power to grow, vitality;" also "prosperity, savings, profits, material gains," from Middle English thriven "to thrive" (see thrive), influenced by (or perhaps from) Old Norse þrift, variant of þrif "prosperity," from þrifask "to thrive."
When I say, “begin as you mean to continue”, how is it that I mean to continue?
2020Thrive is cute and thriving sounds brilliant, but how is that done?
By some level of thrift, as it turns out. If I spend it all now, or consume it all now, or hoard it all now, there is none left for tomorrow. And certainly none left for you or anyone else who might require the same thing. ‘Taking the fat’ is a clear example of not trusting the longer journey.
To flourish I clarify what I need in each moment -- a little sustenance now, a good rest then, a touch of enlightenment and upliftment here, and a root's-fill of groundedness there.
From an enlightened self-centredness, that does not obstruct your right to the same, I thrive.
Thriving not only leads to flourishing, but also to maturity, which indicates the ripeness of having fully developed. In humans this pertains particularly to mind as well as body. It takes maturity to see the wider, longer picture of cycles playing out over generations. It takes maturity to trust the longer journey. It takes maturity to trust that enough is enough now and that there will be enough when next it's needed. Afterall, haven't I already been carried this far?
Comparison and competition have no place in maturing and flourishing. We can all mature into flowers and we can all flourish. There can never be too many flowers.
To thrive I need all the tools in my kete, though not all of them all of the time. I need access to them for the time they each are needed. Some are required more than most, like the medicine of sleep, the sustaining power of food that has flourished, and the blessing of healthy water. And adequate Shelter.
Yes of course I'd love a hermit's cottage at the edge of a wild place, yet I value my freedom and the missions that make me more nomadic a bit more at the moment than I do my own personal desire for a steady home space. Instead I become that steady home space and carry it with me everywhere which is one way we can embody an "enlightened self-centredness".
With both Saturn and Neptune going into Aries this next year, along with a number of other significant outer planets ingressing into new signs, this way of reconnecting with centre — whatever that is for you and however you get there — is essential to surviving the rapid rate spin cycle 2025 will be. If you thought things we're accelerating and amping up before, this year is likely to further necessitate refinement and baseline rigour. Think Braveheart’s Hold! scene.
Or better yet think whirling dervish of the Sufi sort. Hold to your centre. If that sounds like gibberish to you, this new year time is a great place to clarify what IS centre for you and to deliberately root into that. Begin as you mean to continue by choosing the seeds you wish to grow from and the brilliance you wish to flourish and mature into.
May thriving be enlivening for all beings this go-round of our precious planet to our Sun.
If you’re on Instagram, here’s a new year’s song I posted recently:
