New year, new moon, new intention (a word I like much better than “resolution”). Last year I intended to “stretch”, and stretch I did. I stretched into new places and new projects, and pushed farther and harder on my current projects. I challenged myself, for the most part successfully, to do things I had never done before, and to let go of fears and constraints that no longer served me. It was good work, if a bit exhausting in places, and I’m pleased with myself overall.

This dawning new year, though, already seems to have a different feel to it. Though I still am attracted to striving and pushing myself in new directions (and probably always will be), I feel less like I want to expand and more like I want to explore where I’m at. I’ve had a couple of relatively quiet and thoughtful days out here at the beach to try to come up with my intention for 2014, and much as I was hoping for some grand inspirational ideal to present itself to me, the thing that keeps coming up when I think about what I want for this coming year is satisfaction. Satisfaction in the specific sense of feeling sated, that what I have and do is enough, and is pleasurable and fulfilling. I want to find satisfaction in as many areas of my life as possible: my creative work, my relationships, my parenting, my volunteering, my home, my communities. I don’t mean that I “just” want to passively accept whatever good things I currently have (though I do—but that’s gratitude, which is a somewhat different intention) without wanting any more; I want to pursue satisfaction actively (and appreciate it wherever I find it). I want to get clear on what makes me satisfied, and then spend my time and energy doing those things or being with those people or visiting those places. If it isn’t satisfying, and it isn’t necessary to survival, I don’t want to do it. (And if it is necessary to survival yet something I don’t want to do, I want to encourage myself to find some sort of satisfaction in it somewhere.)

So that’s my plan for 2014: find satisfaction. It may be easier or harder at times to find it, and having found it, to keep it; it may take some stretching and some practice. But I would really like to be sitting in a house in Stinson Beach at this time next year looking back on the year and thinking “that was a really satisfying year.”