What The Year Wants

Our family likes to say goodbye to the year at the beach where we watch the sun sink beyond the horizon for the final time. Until we had teens, the kids didn’t make it until the bell dropped, so this was our way of having an early close-out without the slog to midnight.

We live on the Central Coast of California and usually, the place is packed with beachgoers popping corks, spread out on blankets full of charcuterie and sandy feet. We had the place to ourselves yesterday because the storm brought a beating, and there were too many clouds for the kind of sunset that brings coastal Californians out of their homes where we are mostly tired of beautiful things like that.

Alone on the beach, I felt like a newborn babe as I stood atop geology that shows the folds of compressed and fossilized time. That kind of timeless time, combined with the passage of yet another year stirred a sadness and longing in me.

The kids were happy in the rock pile, so I took myself down to the foaming breast of the waves, where I let melancholy dance on the wet sand and imagined that time was both standing still and also only getting faster, perhaps leaving me behind.

I have these thoughts on big thresholds like New Year’s. I don’t like finality. I don’t like doors that close and don’t reopen. Perhaps it’s the dregs of my childhood memories when my parents expressed regret over things they could not let go of, nor go back and fix.

For this reason, thresholds sit heavy with me. The regrets of whatever may have happened weigh me down like boulders in a backpack that I heave around on some holy mission to feel the weight of my life. I am so very tired of the weight in my life.

Alone with the waves, I pulled these old stones from my pack and put names to them: unworthiness, fear, smallness, inferiority. These are the things that sit on my back, on my heart, on my mind, on my life.

I look back up the cliff to my children, who have grown up on this beach. I have photos of them naked and dancing in the summer sun, digging big pits with plastic shovels, screaming their energy into the playful waves. I would load them up in the car at the end of the day, sun-kissed, full of sand in every crevasse, and we would push home in the silence of a day spent matched by the aliveness of nature in her most loud and glorious rhythms.

Yesterday, I saw them on the cliff - one of them now taller than me, the other wiser, and the other still young but beyond his years in what he already demands from this life. I can see time slipping by in them, and there is no more of it to waste with the heaviness of burdens that are better housed on the ocean floor.

So, that’s where I heaved them and watched them sink. I hardly knew how to walk off the beach without all of that weight of unworthiness, but there is room now for the new. There’s not a lot of pomp and circumstance in that statement. It’s just that I need to get on with the new, and I’m feeling that more deeply this year than any previous year I can remember.

I’ve spent most of last year reflecting on these heavy boulders, and every time I think I’ve shaken free of them, they resurface sometimes heavier than ever.

What is it about that circular healing process that can make one feel so alive with new shedding, and then suddenly revisit an old version of yourself, seemingly untouched by healing? I’ve been deeply humbled by this more than once this year, and so this new year doesn’t come with a big proclamation, but rather realistic expectations. Isn’t that the very definition of growing up and growing old - that you know better now?

I have less energy now to get excited about some perceived arrival. I would rather keep a steady state where my eyes are turned up to the sky and my heart is wide open to inspiration. It’s easier that way, and easy is my new currency.

And this feels important because there is more real work to do this year, with a memoir coming down, a collection of poems that need to be in a book, and speaking engagements on the calendar that are designed to be inspiring and uplifting and in need of my utmost attention to hone the message and tone.

If I were to apply a defining line between last year and this year - last year felt like a refinement and training, and this year feels like I’m stepping into the ring. I just ordered new business cards, which I haven’t had since I left my job in the summer of 2022. That felt significant as a starting place for Day One of 2024, but it also felt about as easy as ordering takeout, and the whole thing took about 20 minutes.

This is how we do things now - easy and with clarity of intention and purpose. We are not hustling, or pushing anymore. The new year does not need lofty resolutions or to start with a bang. I left those stones at the beach yesterday because this year is about a lighter load.

We left the beach after dark and I crossed the threshold to a new year carrying only love in my arms. Then, a poem came in the night, and it felt like a prayer. A door closes, while another opens. No finality, just a gentle progression towards tomorrow.

THE NEW YEAR
does not want a bang.

No going out loudly or ringing on your way in. Its ears are sensitive, drawn over with heavy curtains to keep out the cold.

The new year asks for a gentle start. For the dark hours that come early to be an invitation to turn in and whisper to your heart with poems and song.

Be gentle, it whispers back. We are becoming, which is a slow process that gets bruised by too much doing.

Light more fires.
Drink your tea sitting down.
Bring a real book.
And the cat.

Let yourself bump into emotions and dark thoughts. Put them on the page and then burn them, if you must. Make friends with what they want to tell you and then decide if they stay or go.

Your heart told me today that it wants more fires lit in your soul. To drink this life as though raindrops on a leaf, your outstretched tongue catching cool pearls of water, your face turned up to the sky, your heart open to feel.

There is nothing to be afraid of here. I have seen your strength. You have endured more than this.

The fire.
The rain.
Your own thoughts.

There are scars to prove it and they are singing of your precious will to live.

Then live. This is the singular wish of this new year. To see you live and live and live again. To gently beat the drum of your own heart. To stick out your tongue as you reach for the sky.