The Story Continues

I took six weeks off from writing publicly. I can’t say that was a planned hiatus but it was one that was very much needed. Jesus and I had some things to discuss off the record. So here I stand at the start of a new year and like most people, I looked around on New Year’s Day and said, “Okay, now what?”

Looking ahead, I have a whole new year, full of possibilities. I have a challenging semester starting very soon. I have a child preparing for his trip out of the country. I have another child preparing to graduate high school. A vacation is planned and a retreat is too.  My summer classes are planned out and thoughts about the fall semester are swirling as well.

Looking back, my Advent season was a blur between the craziness at work and finals at school. But at the same time, I bought myself a book. As usual, I bought it with the intent of reading it during my winter break. And as usual, I read a page or two and soon found myself completely sucked into a 624 page tome that I legitimately did not have the time to read. So, being me, I read it anyway to the neglect of everything else and finished it late in the night on the night before my sociology final, for which I was should have been studying. By the time I finished it, the semester was over, Advent was over, and Christmas was upon me. Christmas was the way I like it to be – full of quiet and family. There was silliness and laughter and time to just be together without the pressures of school or homework for any of us.

But even with all that 2016 has been and all that is to come in 2017, New Year’s Day started as every day does, with a strong cup of tea, sipped slowly at the kitchen table. The journal that had absorbed all of 2016 was filled. A new one sat waiting. One journal was closed while a new one was opened, but the story is the same story. It’s my story and so as much as things change, they stay the same. I’m still who I am. What became apparent to me during my blogging hiatus is that I finally have come to feel at home into my own skin. As much as I have always felt that I am an outsider, an observer, set aside from the world around me, I am who am I supposed to be and I am where I am supposed to be in life. I know some of what lies ahead. Not all, but enough.

For Christmas, I was given another book, which has captured me even more than the last. All of the questions that came up during my retreat in October are being answered one by one in a book that feels like it was written in answer to my private journal questions. It is a gift of the year that has past which will carry me into the year that has just begun. And so the story continues.

2016 – Day 2

Day 2 of the New Year. The hangovers have lifted and thus begins the onslaught of New Year/New Me social media posts. The ephemeral week between Christmas and New Year’s with its odd work and school schedules gave us a break from real life and it’s so easy to see all the ways we could be better, our lives could be better and huge changes all seem possible and within reach. It may sound cynical, but I’m not that into the whole resolution mentality. I always find the whole New Year’s Eve thing with all its glitter and fakery to be empty and fairly depressing. By January 2, the glitter has been swept up and dumped in the nearest garbage can and reality is poised to return first thing Monday morning. And so we find the need to post our resolutions on social media in hopes that doing so will keep us accountable and/or in hopes that someone will take the journey with us.

I spent decades of my life wondering if I would ever be good enough, if I would ever measure up. I was in constant competition with a ghost who couldn’t be beat. And for what? It didn’t make me a better person. It made me sad, lonely, and angry. So I spent the last few years resolved not to get sucked into the whole resolution nonsense ever again. I’m done with the whole idea that if I only fix [fill in the blank] that life will somehow be better. But this past year or two, I’ve softened a bit. I know I’m not perfect and at the same time, I know I have tendency to expect perfection from myself. And maybe, just maybe, I need to find the middle ground of simply being human.

It seems kind of odd to me that we end the year immediately after celebrating the birth of Jesus. We took a truly new beginning and made it an ending. Then we took an artificial man-made new beginning that seems hellbent on glossing over and/or forgetting the past and put that at the head of our calendar. Jesus’ birth changed all of human history but it didn’t happen all at once. Think about that. Jesus came into human existence as an infant. He didn’t walk out of the stable a week later and start preaching parables. His first new year was spent learning how to talk, how to walk, how to feed himself, and he spent the rest of his life learning what it was to be fully human, all the while being fully divine. Why do we so easily toss aside that idea of infancy and childhood a week after celebrating his birth? Are we that afraid of the humanity of Jesus that we’d rather ignore it entirely in favor of his divinity?

The images of Jesus learning to coo and giggle, and to toddle along, catching himself on Mary’s skirts to keep from toppling over should be ones we consider. If God himself learned to be human one little developmental milestone at time, building each year on the lessons of the one which preceded it, why do we seem so determined to start over fresh and new ever time we buy a new calendar. Why do we constantly need to reinvent ourselves every single year?

I rang in 2016 but there will be no New Me. Just me. Learning to be me. Building on yesterday. And I’m more likely to need to ease up on myself than to hold myself accountable. And if I need someone to walk that journey with, I don’t need to look far. He’s already walking it with me.

Unglitzing New Year’s

New Year’s Eve came around last night. Again. I have a serious love/hate thing going with New Year’s. I ricochet between, ‘Now what?’ [excited that good and new things are headed my way] and ‘Now what?!’ [fed up and overwhelmed already, what further crap could be coming]

I know the latter is not exactly inspiring, is it? But it’s honest.

I had planned to be celebrating with friends but my body had other plans. Between the cold, the coming snow, the stress of the busy season at work and my insane willfulness to just keep going full tilt during Christmas, the RA finally caught up and flattened me. I came home from work at 2:30 in the afternoon. I had to double up on the pain pills. Instead of heading out, I collapsed on the couch with my woobie blanket, feeling exhausted and rather betrayed. I spent the evening migrating between reading Rumi’s poetry and scrolling through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr all while wearing compression gloves to help ease the pain in my hands. I’ve found that I read with different eyes on my down days. And from what I read on social media last night, I’m not the only out there who feels this kind of ‘oh crap now what’ trepidation as we head into 2014. But we gloss over it. We dress it up, take it out, buy it a few drinks and hope it will either change into blindingly brilliant optimism by the time the ball drops or at the very least, stop reminding us of all the things that could go catastrophically wrong in the coming year. Nobody that I’ve seen goes out on New Year’s Eve saying, ‘This year was tough and I’m afraid 2014 will just be more of the same.’ Not because we don’t feel it, but because it’s not acceptable to say it. New Year’s Eve is always the night of the happy, happy, joy, joy song and dance, insincere promises and staged optimism.

But the party is over now. The ball has dropped. Auld Lang Syne has been sung. The sun has risen on a new day, a new year. So the question still remains: Now what? The inflection and tone and the unspoken words carried behind it are up to you. As for me, it will be another quiet down day. But I managed to drag my sorry self down to the beach this morning and kneel in the sand with the sun of the new year on my face. When I stripped away all the glitzy, glossy, staged woohoo optimism, shoved away all the fears that are nagging at me, and took the time to really know the ground beneath me, I was left with one simple thing:

There are 365 dawns in a year. How many do I choose to ignore because I decide, for whatever reason, that I don’t like the way my day is headed even before it starts? I throw away a gift before it’s even unwrapped.

I could make a resolution to change but to be perfectly blunt, I suck at keeping resolutions. They’re too big for me to handle. I’ll stick to unwrapping today. I can thank God for the beauty I saw this morning…

… And for making sure no one saw me trying to stand back up after kneeling on frozen sand in 17 degree weather with knees that aren’t working right. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t graceful. But it was grace-filled and that feels like almost too much for me to accept.