new year upon us: proceed with all the grace you can muster

by bam


Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is sacred. 

~ Hafiz ~

and so we begin. wrapped in the whisper of unknowing. all is vast, and formless. we etch out possibilities, promises, in our mind’s eye. we put shape to what we hope will come, what we worry might come, in the allotment of time we call “the new year.”

as long as humans have been harnessing time, putting order to the rhythms of darkness to light, warming to cooling to warming again, we have imagined our dominion over the hours unspooling. some of us live by clocks. and calendars. and pings and beeps and the showtunes we set to awake us, to remind us to sleep.

i’m especially attuned to the timekeeper beyond the clouds: the solar star. the one around which we turn and spin and revolve in our somewhat elliptical geometries.

what if we returned to a time without second hands, and minutes parsed into fractions, what if we surrendered to shadow and light, allowed the cosmos to do our timekeeping? what if we understood the passage of time by the wrinkles on the backs of our hands, or the ebbing of wisdom that comes with a life lived at attention?

but that is not the world we live in, the moment we live in. we’ve been conditioned, all of us, to count time in blocks, and the newest addition to our arithmetic table is the one we’ve named 2024. and so it shimmers before us: new, unmarked, not yet broken.

not a half day in to this newly-bordered chunk of time, the year threw me a challenge. decided to let me know that my well-laid plans for my first birthday since losing half a lung would not be quite the occasion i’d (for once) carefully plotted (a dinner i’d cook for beloved old friends on the eve thereof, followed by a dinner for three at a charming cafe on the day itself). indeed, they’d be altogether scrapped. our old friend covid decided to drop in unannounced, in the form of a grand exposure (my mate sat for four hours on new year’s eve beside a woman who awoke to a positive test the next morn). and so we did what any respectable citizen would do: we donned our masks for five straight days, steered clear of any and all, and tested accordingly along the way. (so far, so clear.)

i admit to meeting the news with a mighty harumph. and a stinging tear in my eye. in my heart i was crooning something along the lines of “can’t i please catch a fresh start here?” but, alas, covid is covid and there’s no getting around it. so, i cobbled the best that i could: roaring fire all day, long walk under gray cloudy skies; i seized what i could, and turned the page anyway.

and here we are, in what hafiz reminds us is best thought of as “the season to know that everything you do is sacred.”

the new year, i sense, is going to ask plenty of us. i, for one, am strapping on my seat belt. for, as a dear friend reminded me last night, “you may just want, as bette davis said, to ‘tighten your seatbelts. it’s going to be a bumpy night.'”

indeed, it might be. and for such a bumpy spell ahead we shall need to equip ourselves. my plan is to take it slow, and with all the grace i can muster. i’ll bite my tongue when wisest to do so. and speak up with actions not words when that is most warranted. i’ll aim to dollop out goodness all along my way, not unlike hansel and gretel in the woods, leaving behind their breadcrumbs. i’ll imagine droplets of sunlight scattered like shards. and hope to enter and leave each encounter with a soft unspokenness, a sense that something like an angel wing has just wafted by. it’s a big ask, but it’s the litany for which i pray. for i’ve an inkling, like bette, that we’re in for one bumpy night.

what are you seeking to equip you for this year?