"It only ends once. Anything before that is just progress."

December, January, February. The time passes, but life remains the same. Winter is cold, and we've had many snowbound days so far. I don't mind the snow. Maybe it is the variable that interrupts the constants in my life. It gives me something to do, something to marvel over, something to talk about.

As it usually happens around this time of year, my creativity is running out of gas, and is in serious need of replenishment. When my creativity flounders, so does my feeling of self-worth (how depressing!). I seem to run out of inspiration when I have to spend my everydays inside or bundled up inside a tightly wound sausage of cottony layers.

I expressed recently to my friend Victoria that I am feeling suffocated. I come home most days and either stay in my room or the guest room, watching TV and lying down. I am looking for condos, but that is a long process. In the interim, my mind, my heart, everything feels like it's locked up in a black box, dreaming and beating beyond its walls, but unable to burst out and expand.

I was driving and thinking these sentiments the other day when I recalled meeting a Navajo man in an Indian market in Arizona two summers ago. He told me and a few other strangers that it was a beautiful day to wake up on this side of the grass. I find that to be one of the most beautifully reassuring things I have ever heard.

As the months wind on, I am finding ways of reinventing or reestablishing my creativity and thus my sanity and happiness. In one month I am shaving my head in honor of childhood cancer research. The sense of altruism, garnered from fundraising and talking about the cause, leading up to the event is reassuring, and I know the new look I will gain from the shaving will be fulfilling. Today my Dad and I are repainting the guest room, from a pistachio green color to a new pea-soup hue. At first I was opposed to the change--mere laziness--but as we're doing it, it feels good to alter something. I don't really care about the outcome; the room serves its purpose to me whatever the tone, but that I am contributing to its change, and I guess in some eyes, its betterment, for that contribution I feel good.

The time changes, and I need to be more proactive in changing with it. I find myself idly sitting in the sidelines watching my life replaying itself, constant upon constant, not realizing that I can be the variable effecting the change I need to evolve.