Perhaps you’ve noticed I took a couple days off from this website, and much of social media – or perhaps you are like most who didn’t notice a bit, save for the lack of the minor annoyance that my incessant posting has likely become. As a wayward teenager once wrote in a fledgling work, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I can’t help but wonder if the word should be wander.” As November ended and December began, I sought out knowledge and wisdom in the quiet mornings, pulling back from friends who had pulled back from me, in the way that the universe piles on when things get dark. Even writing about what I thought ailed me failed to fix anything, and a therapy session yielded similar results. My daily meditation worked its temporal magic, and kept my heart calm, but shifts were afoot that felt like the culmination of the past three years. It is said that when you grow and change in certain meaningful ways, friends and family don’t always come along for the journey. For the most part, that’s not proven true for me, as I’ve had a pretty good collection of lifelong friends and family who have supported and loved me no matter what. Still, time changes things. A pandemic changes things. And in the world of madness that we’ve all experienced for the last three years, such seismic shifts and changes have revealed to me that there are little to no pillars of stability, and all those things that once felt so solid and true move into the past, further and further away, until they are only faded echoes, remnants that merely approximate what we once felt.
This is what I mourn for now – the realization that our happiest memories cannot be repeated or kept going forever. It’s a lesson that’s been in the making for years. Maybe it’s just the final stage of growing up. I’ve watched traditions I’ve started and done my best to keep up slowly crumble – getting the family Christmas tree with my brother, a holiday stroll with Kira, and a litany of holiday parties and get-togethers with friends – and as they crumbled so too did the connections I once had with people who populated such integral parts of the past. Those people moved on, even as I tried in vain to keep some silly notion of tradition and ritual alive. I held onto such rituals as though they might keep us together. It was folly – noble and heartfelt folly – but still folly no matter how much love and fear was behind it.
Coming to terms with that has taken a while, and in so many ways I’m only just awakening to it, so there’s still a long way to go. I rise in more subdued form these days, because disillusionment robs everyone of the stupid, happy energy that illusions inspire. Clarity is cold at first. Sharp, too. Without sacrificing all sentiment, I go through the days with a clinical and admittedly-calculated precision, designed to acknowledge the messy pain and hurt, to feel it and move through it by being present, failing and faltering in my petty expectations and resentments, all in the service of letting go.
Because I know I must.
A coating of frost on the front lawn catches my eye as the first beams of sunlight sparkle in reflection. It feels like a solemn morning, the way certain December days can in the lead-up to the holidays. Venturing out to examine the frost up close, I breathe in the brisk air, taking the moment for a little meditation first thing in the morning – to set the tone, to ease into the day, to inhabit the moment. The windless atmosphere is quiet – there is a calm that I will try to carry throughout the remainder of the day.
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