Notes from December.
We’ve come full circle. Through each season, tipping past the shortest day. Which means, though it doesn’t feel like it, that we are heading light-wards again. After the disorientation of the festive period, travelling and seeing people, waking up in different beds, spending time with different people with different lives, I’ve come to land, head spinning.
I can almost hear the pause, a communal intake of breath marking a full stop at the end of 2021. Whispers of intentions and motivation and guilt. The appeal of a blank new page, the cursor flashing, waiting for the fireworks to fade after midnight.
It sounds attractive, a blank new page. But this year, it doesn’t feel like it fits right. As if we can just press return and forget the year past, the effects it’s had on us, the way it’s changed us. As if somehow something fundamental can change with the crack of a spine on a new diary.
I don’t mean to sound depressing or fatalistic. I don’t even mean for it to be negative really, though I’m sure for the majority of us, we’re not sad to be leaving 2021 behind.
I just wonder why I am always so eager to draw such a definite line under the year each December. Like I need to start again. As if, somehow, up to this point I’ve failed. As bad, great, difficult, challenging, exciting or painful as the last year might have been… it is part of what makes me who I am right now.
Each year gives both gifts and wounds, things we take into the new year, for better or for worse – and probably both, if we’re honest.
I stop. Take a breath. I bring my scattered self back to this room, this chair, this slant of sunlight, falling across my knees. Collecting it all up, I hold all the lives I’ve shared in over the last few weeks, months, the last year. The people I’ve connected with, whether face to face, a screen or the pages of a book. The things I haven’t been in control of, and the things I have. The things that have changed me, in ways I’ve wanted and ways I haven’t. And I’m going to choose to bring it with me, all the parts of me, into this next year.
Softly, gently, welcoming.