waving goodbye, and hello

As the year comes to a quiet close, I can’t help but look back at it with satisfaction and mild perplexity. It was quite the year, a new lifetime low of loss, while meeting the greatest accomplishment yet. 

I lost my grandfather this year, and I wrote 100,000 words onto my second novel. These things seem to parallel one another. The contrast of my year. I began the year waking in another country, in a different home, and now will celebrate it’s end in another. I moved across the continent and it has been a doozy of it’s own ups and downs. 

I think getting older it like that. Where the middle ground seems easier to find, more comfortable to sit in. I’ve been a creature of extremities, black and white in thinking if you believe my father, but as I turn the chapter into the new year I think I’ve become at least a little more calm. 

It was a year where so much happened it feels as though there is little to say about it, I was too busy living it. Whether chosen or not, life this year has been full. Love and loss learned to take up the same space, to become roommates in my heart, while peace set up camp guarding entrance into me life. 

It, I suppose, was an odd one. One I am not soon to forget, though I can not lie there are things I’d like to leave behind. Like fear. There is enough still I’ll gladly, happily and joyfully, carry with me into the next. Like my book. My book that has been both the source of challenge and delight this year. 

There have been years where entering the new year has felt like jumping off a bridge into a great unknown portal of possibility. This one feels much like redecorating, reordering, the next room over. A simply crossing of the threshold. It is peaceful and full of quiet promise. 

I’d like to begin this new year with expectations I can hold in the palm of my hands. Expectations that do not steal the breath from within me, but set it alight inside my lungs and lifts my metaphorical wings on a gentle breeze. 

If I remember correctly my word for one of these past years had been softly. This year I think it shall be quietly, lightly stepped and peacefully. If I could do this one thing, have peace and step lightly, then I feel I shall succeed this next year. It is something I can hold with my two hands, something I can hold onto when the next inevitable storm chooses to grace my door. 

This is not a resolution, but a directive. Something to guid me when the mist again washes in, when everyone goes home from the party. I’ll hold tight to my careful steps and quiet beginnings. There will be peace, there will be joy, and there will be progress. This is the path I leave for myself to follow, a map I’ve drawn for myself. It is simply, and perhaps little, but it is all I need.