2015 New Year's Wish

As 2014 draws to a close, signalling the end of another year of my life, I am made increasingly aware of the steady passing of time, like the annual tick-tock of the clock of my life, a form of countdown to its end.  I don’t find this a morbid thought – quite the reverse.  It just sets me thinking about what I still have to do, and gives it additional urgency.  This is becoming all the more pressing since my body is finally admitting to its increasing age, with the gradual diminution of all kinds of faculties I have so far taken for granted, foremost among them my hearing.  This has always been a problem and is beginning now to affect my social life to the extent that I have to consider before joining others how far my struggle to hear what people are saying will affect my enjoyment of their company, and no doubt their enjoyment of mine, as I have to ask them to repeat what they have said.  And then there are my creaking knees, about which the less said the better.

But, and here is the flipside to this, all these physical problems which are after all minor compared with what many people are forced to suffer, persuade me that I have in a way to hurry up and do all that I feel I have to do before my body compels me to a full stop.  Certainly my mind appears to be more active than ever (at least nobody has so far dared tell me if this is not true!), though as all of us notice as we grow older, our memory, particularly of names but certainly not of faces, begins to suffer.  My sister, two years older than me, told me recently that she wanted to pack in as much travelling as she could “whilst I still can”, and I, too, want to do as much as I can whilst I still can.  But the big question is not travelling, which I am continuing to do quite happily (off to China again in April for my 7^th visit), but what to write!

The book of my blogs, to be called “On being a five element acupuncturist”, will appear in bookshops in January, and I want to organize a book launch for it, as a way of celebrating its completion but also as a good pretext for inviting many people from my days as Principal of the School of Five element Acupuncture with whom I have lost contact in the years since I closed the school.  I hope the reception room at our Harley Street clinic will be large enough to hold everybody.  But after that, what?

I feel bereft without the project of another book to work on.  Blogs such as the one I am writing now certainly help me formulate my thoughts, but I ask myself whether I have anything left to say about five element acupuncture, or is it more about life that I need to write?  (And as I ask this question there flashes through my mind an odd thought about the way the Fire element walks which was stimulated by watching Rory McIlroy, the golfer, in a re-run of some of the highlights of the Ryder Cup this year on TV.  Remembering this is prompting me to write another blog about the elements.)

At midnight on New Year’s Eve each year I make a pledge to try and complete a further aim which I set for myself for the coming year.  I now only have about three days between now and the end of the year to discover what this year’s wish will be.  Will I manage to do this this year or not?