Another one

Posted by Ken Campbell December 31, 2012 1 Comment 1353 views

It’s happened again, another perfectly good year come and gone.

I am, in general, pleased with the way this year has progressed. It was last January that Steve and I sat down to discuss what would eventually become the Ikkatsu Project, a film-making and environmental undertaking that has turned into my job over the last 12 months… I am excited to see where the next 12 months are going to take it.

I have no resolutions as such, no great and lofty goals for the coming year. I do plan on using less plastic – maybe that qualifies as a resolution – and I am hoping to simplify my life a little in 2013. Hard to quantify either of those…

When I say “use less plastic,” what I think I mean is that I want to eliminate all single-use plastic items from my daily life. I’ve mostly done this already, but there are areas where I could improve. One thing I have gotten out of the past year of Ikkatsu is that the universality of single-use plastic water bottles, grocery bags and other polymer products designed to be thrown away constitutes one of the biggest environmental tragedies on the planet. I am pessimistic about the way we are going and I don’t for a moment think that my not using these plastic items will change the overall trajectory, but I don’t want to be a part of it.

As for simplifying my life… I really don’t know much about that. It just seems like something I might like to try. I guess what I mean by the phrase is that I want to focus more on what has become important to me, less on the peripherals. I mean my family, naturally, and the Ikkatsu Project, but I also mean writing in general. There are other writing projects I have put off, put aside, that have been scraping their claws on the door of my consciousness for a while now, trying to get out. It is time to let them out, to let them run, to see where they will go.

As I write more there, I will probably write less elsewhere. I can see the end for this blog, for example. Not yet, but soon, I think. As a writing notebook and idea mill, it has been a good experiment but all things must pass, yes? Not sure when… stay tuned.

Although the idea of simplification seems to suggest doing less or cutting things out of the daily schedule, I am not sure it has to mean this. It might just as well be that it is a process of putting diverse thoughts and activities into some kind of synchronous orbit around the soul. Harmonizing, more than anything else. If that’s a resolution, then I guess I do have one.

I’m up early on this last morning of 2012, mostly because I don’t want to miss any of it.