“I don’t want to do the same thing year after year. I don’t want to get another year down the line and realize, like I am now, that nothing has changed.” —Journal entry from June 19, 2019
In the midst of melting snow, the winter solstice creeps in unassumingly. Why did I even think to look it up this morning, the first thing I did after rolling out of bed and bending to touch my toes. Years ago, a therapist told me that bending forward, folding yourself in half, resets your vagal nerve and your nervous system. I thought of that while bending this morning, but that wasn’t why I did it. I did it because I need to stretch, I need to feel my body move.
When people say that they forget they have a body, that sometimes they treat themselves like they are nothing more than a brain, I wonder what that’s like. What’s it like to forget your body? To not move and breathe and stretch? Maybe it’s because I’ve been dealing with pain in my back and hip for nearly four months now that I can’t fathom forgetting my body. But that’s not it. I’ve always been in touch with the creaks and the cracks, tense muscles, soreness—what might be considered glitches if I were a machine. They make me fully human.
Today is December 21, the day with the least amount of daylight, only about nine hours between sunup and sundown. That is, if we’d see the sun, which is unlikely today, with the gray sky and melting snow. The temperatures will rise just enough to make the snow wet and heavy, to create drips in the gutters and water sliding down the bay window in the front room. I wish I were someone more tuned into nature and the seasons, someone who felt something on the shortest day of the year, something more than the cozy comfort of early evenings with twinkle lights and candles and sweatpants on at four o’clock.
Maybe if the sun were going to shine, maybe if I had a reason to go outside.
I heard Counting Crow’s “A Long December” on the radio the other day and thought, like we all have, what a long December it’s been. What a long year. But I think that every year, this song bringing me back to myself, back to that teenager who first fell in love with Counting Crows with stars in her eyes and a dream in her heart. She had so much in front of her, so much that she would become. Remembering her, remembering she’s still here with me, keeps me afloat on days when I am nothing more than a lonely raft bobbing on the waves. So many aimless days. Too many to count.
This year is marked by these days, even as time and seasons keep moving along as they should. The weather is sharp and cold most days. The world is adorned with twinkle lights and we’ve filled ourselves up with songs and tradition and the muscle memory of Christmas. Life just keeps happening whether we pay attention or not—a grace, a mercy, if ever there were one.
What’s familiar in these late December days is reflecting over the past twelve months and the wide-eyed wonder of what’s to come. But so many threads have unraveled, so many dangling in the breeze. The question is not so much who have I been or what have I done as, is this still useful or what do I need to let go. This backpack I’ve carried, so worn and perfectly formed to my body, is filled with old relics, vestiges of another time. Some of it is no longer useful. I’m ready to let some things go.
Last week, reading Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace, I was struck by a passage in her essay about feminist theology. In thinking more deeply about her own identity, as both woman and Christian, she questions old voices—the inner perfectionist, the culture at large, the community of writers—and writes this:
“Having brought them to the surface, and as it were exposing them to the light of examination, I found that I no longer had to listen but could let them go.“
It’s a seemingly unassuming line but one that clicked something inside me that’s been out of place, like a joint popping into a socket. I no longer have to listen. I can let it go. Let go of all the weight I’ve been carrying, this heavy pack and its even heavier burden. Let go of all the old voices, old objects, old things.
I don’t have to be that person anymore.
And I can feel the shift, something loosening. I packed up a bunch of books that were cluttering my office, put away projects I’m not working on anymore. I held up pieces of my life and didn’t ask if they sparked joy, but if they are necessary at all. Because maybe they were. Maybe they were things I needed to do or see or have. Maybe they served their purpose or were a distraction, maybe a wrong path, a missed turn. None of that matters now.
What matters is letting go. Letting go makes space for something new.
As much as I could romanticize and spin this into a new year’s tale, or maybe a solstice tale, a tale of rebirth or revival or maybe even a miracle, this is nothing like that. This isn’t a tale so much as a confession, or maybe a glimmer of hope. It’s a reset to the nervous system. Even in the darkness, it’s still possible to take a deep breath, bend forward, and start over.
Even when the night is long and dark, longer and darker than any other night. Just like this year, so long and dark and meandering, so many questions unanswered, so many paths worn down or un-walked. Still, each step matters. One foot in front of the other, one day fading into the next—a grace, a mercy, if ever there were one.
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