I don't usually subscribe to the notion of the New Year's resolution, although there was that one year at midnight when I was 23 and threw down my last cigarette.
It worked.
I never smoked again.
Making promises to myself, meanwhile, just because the calendar changed, generally felt arbitrary.
And yet, this year, there came a defining moment with the turning of the page. It came when my adult children, who'd been home for two weeks at Christmas, left, the morning of Jan. 2, headed back to their homes on the other side of the country. There was a sadness I felt as I waved their car out of sight, not knowing when I'd see them again. There was also a knowing in that moment that something in me needed to shift.
Something had been shifting for some time; 2018 was a hard year, one of profound change and challenge in every area of my life. I found myself curled up in the fetal position not a few times, where I faced what isn't working in my life, which luckily, because of the human will to live, led to an understanding of what is.
This includes my relationships with my children. But that's not all, I realized. What also keeps my heart beating is creating a home, no matter who is here, and cooking balanced, plant-based meals, even if just for me. I find joy in nature and connecting with close friends and extended family. I love doing photography and writing, teaching myself piano, keeping art supplies at the ready on the kitchen table and cultivating a deep and abiding spiritual and emotional fluidity in the face of whatever comes.
Whatever else is missing or not working in my life, I emerged last year with knowledge of other working parts. And as the beloved Christmas season, which I spend weeks building up and looking forward to, wound to a close again, as the last of the visiting children prepared to leave, again, and I looked to what was coming next _ again _ I remembered these activities as regular contributors to my happiness, too.
I consciously decided I will not say no to the rest of life just because my children are gone. Or because everything is not exactly how I want it to be, in the world, in the nation, in my city, my home, in the temple of my body.
I think of my friend, Lisa, who in May lost her husband of 30 years to cancer, and whose children moved away in the same year, who found herself on New Year's Eve with nowhere to go and no one to ring in the new year with.
Her aloneness was profound in that turning-point moment, but her sadness, as it turns out, was momentary.
"I realized I had a choice," she told me.
Instead of giving way to loneliness and despair, she chose to find something productive to do, and she had an enjoyable evening doing so.
I find as time goes on that it's important to live into the sorrows and disrupting changes of life, to feel it all, even sadness after the children have gone.
But sometimes I feel done with sadness for the moment, which is maybe why there are New Year's resolutions.
We humans can become weary of, even bored, with, defeat.
We know something is just the other side.
Like a new year.
Like the quiet fresh of January after the chaos of Christmas.
And like that, we can flip the switch or turn the page. We can clearly see in the stark winter of the moment an opportunity to transform mud into seeds of growth.
"Don't ask what the world needs," said author, educator and civil-rights leader Howard Thurman. "Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it."
I can brand myself as the long-suffering mother who never figured out how to live on.
Or I can take to the piano in the center of the house a little bit every day in the new year, plucking away at "Ode to Joy" with my one hand until such time as I feel ready to play with two.
