Being at once a person who likes to document, label, and record...
...as well as someone who does not care very much for convention, formal goals, or Plans, the last day of the year always makes me a little sad and a little tired. The light seems too soft and too folding, like dying flower petals, or old flannel.
Perhaps it's because I know that a large door is closing. (True, these doors are always closing, but the bigger doors making more resounding thumps.) But maybe also because I always want to look back and have a smug, folded-arms-feeling of satisfaction with regards to the way I've used all three hundred and sixty five of the preceding days.
But I never do.
Not because I don't feel many beautiful and immaculate things have happened, nor that I've gone without revelation, but more because who can say with surety that "yes, that year was a good year. we got many things done, ticked many tasks off the lists with a sharp and cedar-y smelling pencil, are taller, cleaner and more fiercely practical folks than we were last year this time." And from there, a winding downwards staircase can be traveled until you end up in a mildewy basement of forlorn flatness wishing you had thought to buy, perhaps, some shining, steel, red-enameled, steel, German-manufactured, hand-held, single-barreled pencil sharpener. Perhaps that was what was missing, perhaps it was only a small oversight.
And if one lets oneself sink into the basement of despair one gets sidetracked in peeking into old cartons, unlatching boxes, listening to wailing voices that have been set aside for later and one fritters away the whole day.
Maybe this is why there is this universal urge to Resolve things in the New Year. To try and make promises and bargain with oneself, so next year it wasn't all the fault of the mystical pencil-sharpener-that-got away.
Whether or not Resolutions are really the answer, though, isn't relevant. The act and the urge to kindle dynamism and light and to blow around in the fierce winter wrapped in feathers and bravery is the point. And while getting there often lacks grace, if we can even begin the heave of effort we can make it. Usually by appreciating the very small until we are so overwhelmed with little miracles the daunting task of Doing Life can seem a little sweeter.
And if one lets oneself sink into the basement of despair one gets sidetracked in peeking into old cartons, unlatching boxes, listening to wailing voices that have been set aside for later and one fritters away the whole day.
Maybe this is why there is this universal urge to Resolve things in the New Year. To try and make promises and bargain with oneself, so next year it wasn't all the fault of the mystical pencil-sharpener-that-got away.
Whether or not Resolutions are really the answer, though, isn't relevant. The act and the urge to kindle dynamism and light and to blow around in the fierce winter wrapped in feathers and bravery is the point. And while getting there often lacks grace, if we can even begin the heave of effort we can make it. Usually by appreciating the very small until we are so overwhelmed with little miracles the daunting task of Doing Life can seem a little sweeter.
like life blown into life indoors
or the details of something profound and powerful of whom you know only the leftover
or a newly illuminated site you've seen a thousand times...
...over.
and of course, sharing meals
made slowly and deliberately by hand
and of the love that knocks and whistles, all around us.
let the gates open into the year, welcome, greetings and farewell.
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