6 January 2017
Time is no straight line, but rather a labyrinth, and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you can hear the hurrying steps and voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.
Tomas Tranströmer, “Reply To A Letter”
The weight of this year finally hit me on New Year’s Eve. We walked through the reeling streets to our favorite bar, where the father of one of my friends was playing with his band as he does every week. We got free drinks from the bartender we knew, dancing to all the songs we loved the most, and with midnight nearing, we streamed out towards the lakefront, eyes on the massive clock counting down the seconds to the new year, holding hands through the thick crowds. It started to rain as we stood waiting (the third year in a row here in Queenstown, I was told) and we laughed up at the sky and hid under jackets and shouted out the last ten seconds of 2016 as loudly as we could. We wrapped each other in bear hugs as the fireworks started, these people that I didn’t know twelve months ago and some that I didn’t know two months ago, and called each other family. I thought to myself that I would never forget this New Year’s, and then I said it out loud, and everyone nodded as we stood holding each other in the rain underneath the colorful night sky. This was a year that had changed all of our lives, and, in an exuberant second, it was over.
What if it had all been different? What if I had made different choices at different times, wanted and worked for different things, got on the plane or not got on the plane? What if I had passed by my own life as I know it now, separated by the thin veil of chance, fate, destiny, whatever, like ships passing silently under the cover of night? What if the invisible threads that tie this universe together had untangled differently for me this year? These are useless questions. It is all too messy to make sense of – the words I write and speak, the things my heart asks of me; this life.
Luckily, I’m cool with that these days. I’ve recently learned to channel my tendencies towards extreme organization and over-planning into Excel spreadsheets where I keep track of my weekly budget; it’s working out great so far.
There are some other things that have been on my mind lately – namely, the beautiful ache of living that comes with being human. I have never felt more aware of myself as a person, never more teeth-grittingly, knuckle-crackingly, heart-poundingly cognizant of the fact that I am living in the world and breathing its air and walking on its dirt. I suppose it has that effect – seeing so many different shades of humanity and recognizing myself in them, like singing along with a crowd of strangers in a town very far away from home to a song that we all know by heart. This is the beauty.
That is not to say that I don’t have my moments; times when I feel alone, uncertain, unsteady on my feet, times when the only thing I want is to curl up under my blanket and cry because living and choosing and doing feels like an overloaded backpack pressing down on my collarbones until my shoulders are too stiff to move. This is the ache.
What I can do now is take comfort in the fact that I have seen the cyclicality of the world, the way everything echoes everything else, and know that I am not alone in feeling these things, that every emotion I can ever feel has already been felt, that somewhere out there someone is dancing and someone is laughing and someone else is crying and someone else is taking out the trash, tired, after a long day at work, and know that I will do and see and feel all those things once again too, and that it is this very thing that makes me so deeply human. This is the living.
As Tom Stoppard said, because sometimes the perfect words have already been written –
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose…that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
(From Arcadia)
I wish I could tell my younger self about this. I want to say, I know you’re tired. I know you’re anxious. I know sometimes you feel like you can’t breathe when you’re trying to sleep at night for reasons that you can’t explain. But just wait a couple of years – you will be galloping an ex-racehorse through an open field, and you will be writing in your journal on a train chugging through the autumnal German countryside and the low, golden light will be streaming through the carriage windows, and you will be dancing in your best friend’s living room to terrible 90s music, and your heart will feel like exploding for all the right reasons. (You will also work fourteen hour shifts, and sometimes you will feel so tired and worn that all you can do is crawl into bed, but you will decide that this is worth it). I wish I could tell my older self about this too, just as a reminder, just in case I forget; I am pressing up against that labyrinth wall, waiting to hear my own footsteps on the other side, so I can tell myself that I’m waiting here, that I will always be here. I hope I can hear me – and maybe I did, and maybe that’s why I’m here now, writing this. Perhaps I pulled myself here, in some sort of cosmic puzzle of existence; you never know. Linear time is a human invention, anyways. Anything is possible.
It’s a strange thing to feel so young and so old at the same time. Yesterday, on my first day off from work in over a week, I slept in late; when I got up, I spent a few hours working on my budget plan for this year, and then I took myself on a field trip to the local garden center and bought myself some potted herbs to keep in the kitchen – mint, rosemary, basil, and oregano, if you’re wondering. I spent the rest of the afternoon repotting plants, and I felt deeply content. I have been told on multiple occasions by different people that I’m an “old soul” (or, slightly less elegantly, that I’m “20 going on 45”).
On the other hand, I recently texted my mom to ask if lamb sausages were safe to eat if I defrosted them in the microwave, and have wished fervently many times over the last few weeks that my dad was here so that he could take my car to the shop for me because mechanics are kind of intimidating. (I know that they know that I know nothing about cars. I must cast myself on their mercy and expertise and it is terrifying). Perhaps someday if the age of my soul finally matches the age of my body I will truly know peace and enlightenment – but to be honest, I don’t have time to be waiting around for that to happen when I could just be living my life as it is now: messy and hilarious and boring and raucous and just the way I like it.
I will leave you with one of my favorite poems, for no real reason besides the fact that I love it and want to share it with you, the reader, whoever you are; I hope it makes you feel warm and calm, like you are really in those snowy woods, listening to that soft silence, feeling both the call of the road and the comfort of going home.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Robert Frost
Whose woods are these I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Let’s go, 2017.
SGBRSH 