New

Goals and resolutions and year-end recaps are running wild all over the Internet right now. And I don’t know why this is especially significant to me this year as it’s been regular practice since I started blogging, since I started even reading blogs. But having never been a resolutions person at the start of a year, I guess I partly admire it and am partly stressed by it. Admittedly, I prefer to make changes in oh-crap fashion. As in: “Oh, crap. This really isn’t working for me, is it? Let’s change… now!” Sometimes I am successful, sometimes I am not. Sometimes things are completely out of my control, and sometimes ways I need to change hit me like a ton of bricks in the middle of, say, May.

Just the same, though, I appreciate the idea of starting new. Not of clean slates, no. I am sort of against clean slates. But starting new, trying something new. I can get behind that. (And yes, there is a big, big difference. Which I think I’ll get to in a minute.) For me, though, it seems by the time January hits I seem to be okay with things. Maybe it’s the Christmas high still hanging on, or that I’m more inspired to change during other months, but I feel like in January I just want to embrace what is.

Which is why I think clean slates don’t work out (oh, look, I did get to it). Not in our minds, in our relationships, or in our goals. The older I get the more I realize that the cliche of learning from every experience is ageless for a reason: it is true. And so the idea of wiping everything out is almost… disrespectful to life, and to what we’re meant to take away from each piece of our past. I know there are people that can go through life without attaching a lot of meaning to things, but I’m not one of them and, honestly, I have no idea how they survive. How they get through tough times, or good times even. So the concept of not taking experience forward is admittedly absurd to me.

This year has contained some tough moments for me, no doubt. I haven’t put them all on the Internet, that’s true, but I have had some dark times, hurt some people, and been hurt myself. I have had to get really honest in a lot of ways, and I’ve had to “trust the process”, as they say, even when I really had no idea what the process was. When I had no idea what the goal was, really. I have also had some really joyous times, being present when my baby nephew was born, watching friends start a life together, watching people grow in ways that made me feel blessed to just know them. I have learned more about tragedy around the world, and in my own neighborhood. I have learned more about hurt and pain in my own relationships, and I have learned more about what I want for my life.

The only way I can figure out how to move forward into 2012 or any other time is to embrace it all, to not have a clean slate. Sure, I could work and angst and try and try to pretend I didn’t just see and feel everything I went through, or I can embrace it all, as it is, and count on the richness of that to make every moment ahead that much sweeter, that much more valuable. That, actually, I think is pretty risky, too.

Yes, climb a mountain. Yes, be adventurous. God, yes, SAY YES. But not just to the outward things like mountains and airplanes, but the inward things too, like experiences and feelings, pain and joy. That is where I want to live, because though I may not like it, it is all mine to use from this moment forward. In that way, no matter if it’s a day or a year, everything is sort of new, isn’t it?