Author: kathleenjowitt

Haven’t you ever been caught in a moment, a magnetic swirl of a moment, when you knew – just knew – that something magical was taking place?

You might feel as if a portal into Something has opened at your heart to release a sort of energy into your own private universe, telling you, “Remember your magic…” 

Think of three important portal points – one in the past, the present, and one you hope to have in the future – and join them together into one powerful and personal gateway into 2016.

Where will walking through this gateway lead you in this upcoming new year?

I remember the day of my interview for my current job. It was a brilliant day, it felt, if I may be allowed a Harry Potter reference, as if I’d taken Felix Felicis: everything seemed to go right. Oh, apart from the bit where the administrator forgot to reset the MS Word test and I had to undo all the previous candidate’s work before I could do my own; I nearly walked out at that point. But I kept my head and worked out how to untangle it, and everything else was great.

It was a Tuesday. I like Tuesdays. I had a fortuitous day of time off in lieu, so I took the Monday off. For some reason I can’t now remember, we were staying with the in-laws, who live on the easier side of London for the office. On the train, I passed the pub that says TAKE COURAGE in huge letters on the side. While I was drinking a cup of tea in a café, waiting for it to be an appropriate time to go in, a family friend emailed some pictures of my beloved, much-missed godmother, whose birthday it would have been. My visitor’s pass was number 26: my birthday, and part of the fleet numbers of two of my favourite buses. After I’d dragged myself through the Word test, the interview went enjoyably smoothly. Two university friends whom I hadn’t seen for ages happened to be in London, so we met up for lunch before I headed south to go back to work. All the way through, it felt as if the universe was on my side.

Where am I now? Still in that same job, but living sixty miles to the north-east of London rather than twenty-five miles to the south (weirdly, the commute is actually easier, not that it feels like that in the dead of winter). It feels as if I’m in something of a lull. There isn’t much going on at the moment; it’s that still point when the year is at the turn. There’s space here, and I need it.

There are at least four huge, important developments that are about to happen or will happen within the next year or two years, or could very well happen, and I want all of them to happen. For the sake of symmetry, I’m not going to specify what any of them is, though one at least is no secret.

I’m reluctant to pick just one of them for my future point. I am laying them out in a line: first this, then this, then this, and that can be slotted in at any point, but I’d rather it were sooner than later.

Here’s a trajectory with five points on it, then. What will I find if I follow it?

Safety. Adventure. Roots. Puzzles. Love. Claiming my ground. Growth. Learning. Trust.

Ancient alchemical texts are things of beauty – filled with allegory and symbolic language; things hidden in plain sight; and plain things promising transformation.  

If we were to peek into the book of your year, what might we find?  

What magic do you carry that people need to look a bit deeply to see?

This year was meant to be something of an interlude, a space where nothing major was going on, a chapter of pure indulgence where one could revel in the lush surroundings and not worry about the plot.

It didn’t quite work, of course; there was always a part of me that was desperate to know what happens next, and to read ahead and make it happen. Never mind. This was the Year of Fun, and I had fun.

This year I tried to include more white space. I blocked out a week at a time in which to do nothing, to recover, to replenish my resources. The interesting thing is how much more white space I need than that, or perhaps how I need to distribute it differently. I’ll keep experimenting.

As for allegories, well, the mermaids are still around, finding out how to get from the sea to the dry land in safety. I am becoming an ostrich, or maybe a dragon: something that eats iron, anyway. I’d like to be a tortoise, but can’t quite work out how.

Magic? I have been a fairy godmother since I was nineteen, but of late I have discovered that all the fairy godmothering that I need to do is sit and listen while my charges work out for themselves what they need to do.

You wake up and the light through the window seems different, the air carries a chill or maybe a hint of warmer days.

What has changed? You? The world?

It can be a change that happened this past year or one you’re looking toward in the time ahead. It can be a broad sweep obvious to all or a more subtle shift that only you know about.

Tell us about transformation. 

This year my birthday present to myself was two handbags. Now I’m thirty, you see, I thought I ought to have a grown-up handbag, and carrying a black handbag while wearing brown shoes, or vice versa, is a thing that I don’t do without very good cause.

Grown up. That’s what I’ve done this year.

I’m not sure that you could tell by looking at me. My physical appearance hasn’t changed much this year; I’m still wearing my short skirts and long earrings; my hair has a few more white strands, perhaps, but it’s still short and sharp.

Could you tell by talking to me? Perhaps. Perhaps I seem more confident, or more opinionated. Perhaps I seem quieter. Perhaps you would notice that I wasn’t talking to you so much as I used to. I’ve become better at respecting my own need for solitude. I’m learning the rituals of small talk, but at the same time I’m learning how to escape it.

And perhaps I haven’t really changed at all; I’ve just become more myself. I find myself having a much clearer idea of what I want from life these days; I find myself beginning to make choices based on my own inclinations rather than by picking some externally decided virtue (‘the cheapest’… ‘the most ethical’… ‘the one I haven’t tried, because I am Meant to be trying new things’… of course, sometimes I remember that I am Meant to be Doing What I Feel Like and then come unstuck, but it’s all practice). I’ve been enjoying myself. I designated this year a year of fun, and I have had fun. I find myself making my own plans and acting on them. I find myself recognising my low days as atypical and remembering that my depression does not define me.

I feel less awkward. I feel less apologetic. I feel braver.

I’ve grown up. I like it.

Can you think of an instance in the past year where you have been successful at making fear useful? 

What fears do you hold about the year ahead? And how could you use the energy of those fears in a different way?

This year has been remarkably free of fear. This has been the first full year where my partner and I have both lived under the same roof and had full-time, permanent jobs. I’ve been coming to understand that life doesn’t necessarily have to be lived in a state of fearful uncertainty.

Which is not to say that it has been entirely free of fear. Most of my fears have been niggly and silly. “Yes, but did I lock the front door? Did I turn the gas off? What will I come home to tomorrow?” I suppose that, the more this happens, the more likely I will be to pay attention when I’m turning off the cooker and locking the front door, and not need to turn back half way down the road.

Next year? I can think of at least three big, potentially terrifying things that might happen, ranging from ‘hmm, maybe’ to ‘almost certain’. These are three things that I want to happen, things that I am putting deliberate effort into effecting. None the less, they are scary: they’re big life changes; they’ll have significant effects on the way I think of myself; they could all go horribly wrong.

How to use the fear that comes with them? I think that in each of these cases the fear is a sort of background acknowledgement of how big they really are. The fear is a signifier of their importance. I think that if I acknowledge how huge they are, and acknowledge the fact that actually I really am quite scared of [X], [Y] and [Z], even though I want them to happen to much, because I want them to happen so much, I won’t need to do anything to the fear; it will transform itself into something delicious and exciting.