"One Little Word" for 2014

For the past four years, I’ve taken part in the One Little Word challenge. This is a collaborative event in which participants from all over the country choose one word to use as a guidepost or inspiration in the upcoming year and submit it to a website, which gathers together all the words so that they may inspire other people.

In 2011, I chose “Possible.” For 2012, “Succeed.” And last year, “Walking.”

Some years, I admit, it’s a pretty amorphous exercise. “Possible,” for example, seemed so tentative as to be wishy-washy, and yet it was just how I felt as the year began. A lot of things were possible, none certain. If the word has a rather neutral tone, so did my feelings about the possibilities for the upcoming twelve months. Much that was possible did in fact transpire.

The word for 2013 was stronger in its meaning but perhaps mundane: walking. It reflected my acknowledgment that walking, as in going for walks, was far and away one of my favorite things to do, mundane or not, and that one focus of the upcoming year had to be a priority on finding time to take walks.

This year, the word came to me out of the blue: Radiate. That too may seem like a strange word, compared to the more typical choices – the ones that hundreds of participants to the One Little Word challenge submit to the website – words like Inspire, Simplicity, Joy, Acceptance, Hope. “Radiate” sounds a little bit like “radiation,” which seldom has very auspicious connotations. But “Radiate” is what I feel like as the year begins. I feel like this is a year for radiating kindness, radiating generosity, radiating acceptance. Not holding good things within but sending good things outward, in waves: from within myself out into the world. Happiness. Contentment. Gratitude. Starting within, radiating outward, rippling in circles around me, casting an ever-wider influence.

That may be a lot to hope for in the new year, but at the moment it feels right. I will try not only to be generous and kind and caring but also to have those intended attributes radiate from within and cast light around me. It’s not just a matter of being all of those things; it’s also about sending them out into the world.

Radiate. A verb this year, whereas other years I’ve had a gerund – walking – and an adjective – possible. It would be overreaching to suggest that this is a year for action words. I don’t yet know what this year will call on me to do or to be. But I am trying to radiate well-being and other good things as I make my way into 2014.

Not resolutions

As soon as we returned from our New Year’s Eve dinner, Holly hurried upstairs and pulled out her journal. “What are you writing about?” I asked her. “I’m writing my New Year’s resolutions,” she said.

Earlier this week, a friend mentioned in an email that she was thinking about making a New Year’s resolution and wondered if I was making any.

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, and then in more recent years I started thinking more in terms of New Year’s goals: not things I was certain (rightly or wrongly) that I would do, but things I was firmly committed to trying to do.

But this year, as soon as my friend asked in her email whether I was making any New Year’s resolutions, I realized how different I was feeling this time around about starting a new year, and how somehow both resolutions and goals seemed somewhat irrelevant.

It’s not that I don’t have plenty of room for self-improvement. It’s just that when I look back on the preceding year and especially the latter half of it, it seems like so much of what governed the course of my life was nothing I did or didn’t do but things that happened to me, or around me, or to all of us. Events beyond my control over which neither resolutions nor goals would have held much sway.

After all, you can’t make a New Year’s resolution not to lose any friends to cancer. You can’t resolve that in the new year, you won’t have to explain to your kids that children sometimes lose their parents, or that parents sometimes lose their children. You can’t resolve away poverty or despair among people who have even less control over their circumstances than you do. You can’t make a New Year’s resolution not to live in a society where people crusade for the accessibility of submachine guns.

I don’t mean to sound despairing. It’s not that we had such a bad year ourselves, not at all. My family, both immediate and extended, stayed safe and healthy and well. We took some great vacations, accomplished some satisfying work, and saw the kids be both happier and more academically successful in school than we ever would have dared hope.

But I’m afraid for the most part this is just the reality of middle age catching up with us. Statistically, we are destined to lose more friends in the upcoming years than we did in the preceding ones. And the world doesn’t appear to getting safer or saner or fairer, either nationally or globally.

If we are as fortunate as we’ve been in the past year, 2013 won’t bring tragedies or losses too close to home. But that’s not a resolution; it’s a fervent hope. Things will happen, both good and bad. And while I don’t mean for my lack of resolutions to sound like, well, a lack of resolution, or a sense of passivity, I think better than making resolutions or setting goals for the upcoming year will be thinking about my reactions and responses.

I can’t resolve to keep these things from happening; I can just hope to keep improving in the way I respond to them: to be ever more helpful, compassionate, understanding, proactive.

It’s not really what I’d call a resolution. But right now, it feels like the most useful thing I can do.

 

 

 

Un-decorating

Putting away Christmas ornaments feels like a task that embodies the spirit of New Year’s Day, even more so than putting out Christmas ornaments embodies the spirit of a Saturday in early December. As joyful a feeling as it is in the weeks before Christmas to fill the house with sparkly things and fragrant things and little objects that glitter, it’s an even more welcome feeling to put them all away on the first day of a new year.

Setting up the tree ushers in the holiday season. The kids love this job; they remark over each ornament as they unpack it, reminiscing about where it originated – as a preschool crafts project, a gift they still remember unwrapping, a memento bought on a vacation far from home and far from Christmastime – and working together cheerfully as they decorate the tree’s branches and then carefully arrange the larger Christmas decorations elsewhere around the house.

Three or four weeks later, when it’s time for the un-decorating, the kids tend to disappear, consumed suddenly with other necessary tasks in other parts of the house, but I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me to put away the ornaments and decorations by myself. I love seeing the living spaces of the house miraculously become uncluttered: tabletops bare again, the corner where the tree stood once again open, nothing dangling from overhead in the entryway. It’s the biggest and yet also the easiest decluttering process of the year: no big decisions about what to keep and what to discard and where to store what; it all goes into the big plastic Christmas bins, and from there down to the basement.

I’m not good about treating the ornaments delicately. Though they may look as if they should each be wrapped individually in tissue paper, years of experience have taught me it isn’t really necessary: storing them in layers with soft items such as Christmas stockings or tablecloths between layers is almost always good enough to preserve them intact for the next year. It gets the job done quickly, and it gives me the instant gratification of seeing my nice neat house emerge from under the holiday glitz once again.

A tidy, sparsely decorated house for New Year’s feels exactly right: clean open lines to welcome a new year that hasn’t itself been claimed by ornamentation or themes yet. The year will develop its own details as it develops; plans, events and memories will eventually dot the calendar like decorations on a Christmas tree. Right now, the year is still unclaimed, and so are the surfaces and spaces in the house that yesterday were still filled with Christmas décor. It’s good to have breathing space – in our house, in our minds – as we welcome 2012.

Un-decorating after New Year's

It’s sort of a holiday Jack Sprat story, I suppose: my children and husband love putting the Christmas ornaments up, and I love taking them down.

They look forward to a mid-December Saturday each year when the three of them file up to the attic and then march down with plastic bin after plastic bin. I think we have four in all, plus a few smaller cardboard boxes, housing our Christmas décor. Then there’s the tree stand and the tree skirt. The Christmas storybooks have their own box as well, and even though Holly doesn’t read picture books anymore at other times of year, she still likes to pore over Santa Mouse, the pop-up version of the Nutcracker, The Polar Express, Christmas at Noisy Village (my favorite) and all the others. So when she gets tired of the decorating process, she heads up to fetch the carton of books and places it near a comfortable armchair for pleasure reading throughout the holiday season.

I don’t remember ever taking a stand against helping them with the decorations; it’s just evolved into an unspoken tradition. There’s so much else for me to keep busy with around the house on December weekends. So somehow it just always happens that they do this job while I’m baking Christmas cookies, preparing packages for mailing or composing our annual Christmas card poem.

When New Year’s rolls around – the day itself, or the day after, if that happens to be on a weekend as it was this past year – I do the undecorating without any help, and that’s fine with me. I find it so soothing to take each little bauble and trinket from its place on the tree or table or shelf, wrap it in a sheet of tissue paper of newspaper, and place it back into one of the plastic bins.

To some extent, the appeal of this process is obvious, especially for someone who prioritizes domestic tidiness as much as I do. Our rooms just look so neat and spare after the decorations are put away. Once we’re accustomed after a few weeks to seeing their shiny shapes and bright red, silver, and gold hues, the spaces they’ve left behind look even cleaner and clearer in their absence than those same spaces did before the ornaments went up.

But the peace of mind that this job brings me goes beyond mere housekeeping. I like saying goodbye to the ornaments. I like thinking about how they’ve borne witness to yet another joyful holiday season, marked by family get-togethers, parties, visits from friends, and the ritual of gift-giving on Christmas morning, but that now it’s time for us to foray into the New Year without them, to focus on our January goals and upcoming plans free of the responsibilities that the holiday season always entails.

Of course, there’s never any guarantee that these ornaments will witness another happy holiday season with us, and I’m far too suspicious a person by nature to promise the ornaments that we’ll be reunited with them under the same circumstances in a year. But I’m willing to take that chance as I bid them farewell for the next 11 months. At some point during the summer I’m likely to be up in their corner of the attic, and I’ll cast them a quick passing glance, sweating in the heat of August and almost unable to imagine another snowy December day when we’re ready to take them out yet again. But for now, it’s good to see them go, knowing that clean, bare surfaces and the clean slate of a new year are taking their place.

Running, symptoms, and lessons from 2010

The idea of a long run midmorning on New Year’s Day was appealing. I thought about how good it would feel to get out into the fresh cool air and meditate on the year ahead: set goals for myself, imagine possible outcomes, focus on areas for improvement.

Instead, I found myself reflecting on the ways in which an unexpected situation – namely, the sense that I had an incipient sinus infection – served as a metaphor for the year that had just ended.

The sense that a sinus infection was about to take hold over me was unpleasant in itself but didn’t really put a damper on my wish to hit the six-mile route I’d already planned out in my mind as I indulged in a little sleeping-in that morning, in the wake of New Year’s Eve festivities.

And besides, I didn’t have a full-blown infection, just the approximate symptoms of one.

So I set out. But it wasn’t as much fun as I anticipated, because even though I was feeling generally fine, I couldn’t stop worrying. What if it got a lot worse? What if after a couple of miles I started to feel really uncomfortable? What if it turned into actual pain? What if I developed a fever?

But you don’t even have a sinus infection, I told myself. You just have symptoms. You’re probably absolutely fine. Besides, it’s a New Year’s Day, so just be brave. This isn’t like the middle of the week when you can call your doctor and ask her to prescribe antibiotics just in case things get worse. Sure, you could put in a call to the practice, but it’s closed for the holiday: you’d have to wait for a call back from the covering physician, and explain your symptoms, and figure out where and when you wanted to pick up the prescription…that’s way too complicated. Just keep running and stop worrying about it.

I reminded myself again that I didn’t have an infection, just symptoms.
And then I told myself that my worrying was ruining what was supposed to be a peaceful, meditative, six-mile run on a mild sunny New Year’s Day.

At that point I started to feel better. I stopped worrying and the symptoms lessened. I started to enjoy the sunshine, the scenery, the tranquility of having the road almost to myself on this holiday morning, the sight of a snowman in a front yard, a red-tailed hawk circling over a field, the aroma of baking from a house I passed.

Then, inevitably, I noticed how many similarities existed between my condition on that run and much of what had transpired in my life in 2010. It was almost as if the incipient sinus infection stood as a symbol for lessons I may or may not have assimilated, but certainly had plenty of opportunities to do so, throughout the previous twelve months.

For example:

• I nearly ruined my chance to enjoy what I was doing because I was too busy worrying about what might happen in the near future. Even though I was feeling fine, the prospect of hypothetical problems kept me from focusing on what was actually happening.

• At the same time, I tried to tell myself that what all signs pointed to couldn’t possibly be true. Although I had the three or four primary symptoms of a sinus infection, I kept telling myself I didn’t have one, rather than accepting the fact that most of the time, if enough signs are pointing in the same direction, chances are it’s an accurate reflection of the truth.

• And finally, there was the conclusive realization that it was just good sense to take precautionary measures. Even if I was bound and determined to will myself back to perfect health and refuse to admit the possibility that an infection might still be brewing, trying to reach the physician on call at my doctor’s office and asking for a prescription for antibiotics early in the day rather than waiting until the middle of the night was a sensible solution.

Inexplicably, by the end of the day I felt all better. The symptoms were gone. And that was great; I was delighted to have started the new year on such a promising note. But if I needed one last review of the lessons of 2010, I’d had that as well. Don’t worry so much. When irrefutable information presents itself, use that to draw logical conclusions. And pursue sensible measures to improve the chances of a positive outcome.

Illness as metaphor: a peculiar phenomenon indeed, but I paid attention. And I very much hope not to make any of the same mistakes in 2011. Here’s to wisdom. And health.

New Year's Eve Day: looking back

I seem to always look back on the year gone by on December 31 and look forward to the year ahead on January 1 – even knowing the artificiality of these arbitrarily designated days. Does it really mean anything to say that one year has ended and a new one is beginning, when were it not for the calendar we’d probably see no difference upon waking tomorrow morning compared with waking today?

But in a way, I do sense a palpable ending/beginning rhythm to the year. Christmas vacation involves such a build-up of activity; now we clean up the mess, enjoy a couple more days of sleeping late, rally to complete those household tasks put off for the past ten days (my kids really need to find time to clean out their school backpacks and put away their Christmas presents between now and bedtime Sunday), and look toward the coldest, bleakest part of the winter – a perfect time for hunkering down and regrouping on projects, resolutions, plans, goals and hopes.

Today, though, I’m still thinking about 2009. Every year at this time, I’m a little bit amazed to look back at the variety that the past year contained. This might not be apparent from an outside view of my life. I continue living in the same house with the same people, writing for many of the same publications, involved in many of the same activities and groups. But to me, it still feels like the past twelve months encompassed a lot of different elements. I didn’t expect to have such a wonderful time in New York last February; the 48 hours of fabulous dining, sightseeing and Broadway exceeded my expectations in every way. And I never imagined when 2009 began that I’d spend a week at the Aspen Summer Words conference, nor that the experience would prove to be so rewarding: during my six days there I made new friends, read a lot of interesting work, networked with other writers, and learned a lot about the craft. Also influencing major shifts in my work during 2009 was my new agent, who prodded me to get with the social media program, so now I blog and Twitter as well as just writing.

The year included many interesting article assignments for the various publications I write for, and I have a new editor at the Globe who’s terrific to work with. I picked up a few new corporate clients and made a few new friends. Our community suffered some significant losses but my closest circles, mercifully, did not. We hosted some fine events and attended others. The kids learned, played and thrived. Rick started a new job; Holly learned to ride a bike. I ran at least a mile all 365 days. I neither gained nor lost weight (though I did lose some night vision. It happens). I attended my twenty-fifth high school reunion, which while not the peak experience it might have been was still a convivial way to spend a Saturday. I read some magnificent books and articles, and put my own manuscript through several revisions before offering it to a few friends to read and critique. I didn’t give enough to charity, but I tried to help out when and where I could.

It was a good year, a fortunate year, a blessed year. I’m looking forward to the next one. And I’m realizing that just like a year ago, I simply have no idea what the upcoming 12 months will turn out to hold for us.