True to form, I already started this post earlier, on New Years Eve, didn't finish it, and decided what I had written wasn't really worth keeping anyway. So I erased it all, and started again on a blank page on this first day of the year, and of the decade.
In a way, it seems kind of symbolic. We've been told, and maybe we actually believe, that the New Year is a time of change. Of improvement, and even of starting over. A time to shed the things in your life that weigh you down, and to carry on without inhibition. Because it's the new year. And new is somehow...different.
But of course, I've always had trouble seeing the passage of time as an indicator of any kind of practical change. I wrote a post about that, many years ago on my birthday. I talked about how numbers simply quantify time, they don't define it. The river keeps on going; it may be flowing past different mile markers, but you could move the mile markers and the river would be the same old river.
The mile markers aren't special because they make us come farther. They're special because they remind us of how far we've come.
2019 was a strange, dramatically subdued year for me. I look back and it seems at first glance that I've accomplished absolutely nothing this past year. I still have no idea what I'm doing with myself. I'm still struggling with many of the same sins. I have fewer friends than I did twelve months ago.
It's only when I look long and hard at the last mile marker that I understand just what this year has meant in the grand scheme of my life.
There are many things that I could look at and point to and say, "In at least some small ways, this thing has changed me."
I have a job. I have several new stories that I will someday finish. I have a nephew, the sweetest little three-month-old who loves to smile at Aunt Anna. I have ideas for things that I want to do. My room is a little bit cleaner than it was the other day, and will likely continue to improve. I say likely, because I've decided that that is worth my time, and so I will not simply hope for a cleaner room; at least not without then walking back into the house of action and getting to work.
But one of the most important ways in which I've grown is in how I take pain. I'm not good at pain. It's just so uncomfortable. But this year I've learned that there are things that I can't control, and I've learned to accept the consequences of these things. I cannot overrule God. And while this sometimes leaves me feeling lonely, it also helps me see that I can live, and I can live well, without many of the things that I didn't think I could lose.
I don't know what the coming year holds. I don't know a lot of things about myself and about my life. If I'm being honest, there's some apprehension doing its rounds in my heart. There's so much left behind.
But look--there's so much river ahead.
