Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Did you have a lovely holiday? I hope you all have lovely holidays. Whatever you celebrate,

or if you celebrate nothing, I hope it was lovely. And good riddance 2020, right?

Although, you know, for some people, 2020, you know, as I said, the last time we talked, it was a good teacher.

It helped us, it helped a lot of us learn a lot of things about ourselves.

So let us not be too cruel to it, and we're so glad it's over.

And nature doesn't know that we have started

counting again so who knows what will happen but probably nothing very new anyway welcome back

and today let's do a little new year's magic I was talking to some friends yesterday and we

were discussing new year's resolutions, and specifically

the sort of new age goal setting thing where you write down a whole bunch of things that you want,

but write them down in incredible detail. The classic model on which it's all based. There was a woman who wrote an article for Oprah

magazine years ago, not me, another woman, and she had made a list of 100 characteristics

she wanted in a husband. And she wrote them all down and she put it away.

And then years later, she met this wonderful man and they were dating and it got serious.

And so she said, I am going to go dig up my list.

So she went and dug up her list.

And she gave it to her boyfriend and she went in the other room. And when she came back,

he was weeping. And she thought it was because they were so dissimilar that he had to go his

separate ways. But what he said was, there's only one thing wrong. You didn't, I wear a different

color of socks than the socks you listed. Everything else describes me.

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