Every year, without fail, I think about the past year in snippets of time without much context at all. They are scenes from a movie on a broken tape without a timestamp. I can make out the shape of nature and the intensity of sunlight or the hardness of the rain or the snow in the background of the scenes to depict when they might have happened, but the rest doesn't matter.
Sometimes I don't believe the things I have achieved, sometimes I beat myself up for not achieving more. It is a silly game I like to play with myself, but in the end, I always think, you've done your best, the journey continues, and something is always better than nothing.
If there were some kind of graph, I would say that this year I have felt an immense amount of gratitude. Gratitude for my family and my boyfriend and my friends for standing by me. Gratitude for my new colleagues, my new job. Gratitude for everything that came after my debut novel's release, and the ever-growing support I receive on social media, which is a big – perhaps and most definitely even the biggest – part of the reason I am writing. Yesterday, today and tomorrow and all the days after. The constant of my being: the words on paper, clicking away at my mechanical keyboard. All the satisfying sounds.
I have plans in store; I recognised this when I purchased a new small 2022 Moleskine daily planner for my “one entry a day” challenge for all of next year. And I think whether I follow through with those plans or not, I can always think back on the journey already behind me, and how the path is shaping as I go. I hope one day you see that, too. Any direction from here is still forward. Maybe this is the most important realisation in our lives, with everything so uncertain, and really never up to us.
We are in our ‘tenderly unfolding moment’, waiting to stretch out our wings. But how long will we wait? There is a rawness to waiting, but once the waiting is over, will we know how to navigate this world as the selves we are now? We live for this growing, we live in the understanding that we are not quite there yet. Nothing’s on our pinboard, but our potential burns.
For the rest of my journey, I printed this poem to keep with me at all times:
Pat Schneider,
Instructions for the journey
The self you leave behind
is only a skin you have outgrown.
Don't grieve for it.
Look to the wet, raw, unfinished
self, the one you are becoming.
The world, too, sheds its skin:
politicians, cataclysms, ordinary days.
It's easy to lose this tenderly
unfolding moment. Look for it
as if it were the first green blade
after a long winter. Listen for it
as if it were the first clear tone
in a place where dawn is heralded by bells.And if all that fails,
wash your own dishes.
Rinse them.
Stand in your kitchen at your sink.
Let cold water run between your fingers.
Feel it.
Another poem I found great comfort in:
Linda Hogan,
Innocence
There is nothing more innocent
than the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
neither of us knowing what it will become
in the abundance of the planet.
It makes a living only by remaining still
in its niche.
One day it may struggle out of its tender
pearl of blind skin
with a wing or with vision
leaving behind the transparent.
I cover it again, keep laboring,
hands in earth, myself a singular body.
Watching things grow,
wondering how
a cut blade of grass knows
how to turn sharp again at the end.
This same growing must be myself,
not aware yet of what I will become
in my own fullness
inside this simple flesh.
Maybe we are at crossroads, wondering which path to take. Maybe our paths from here on out look foggy. Maybe they don’t look like paths yet at all. But that is nothing to be afraid of. Maybe instead of standing and waiting, we are sitting down in a vast field, met by sunshine on soft grass, talking to each other.