On the eve before each birthday, I like to sit down and write, right around midnight, usually for a good hour of pouring out and thinking ahead. This is a ritual I’ve been observing for many years, and I always write by hand rather than type. Because I rarely write by hand anymore, the journal in which I’ll write tonight is the same one I’ve used for several past years too. Its pages never seem to fill anymore. There was a time when I filled several paper journals each year. At one stage, I faithfully recorded my dreams upon waking. But I’m not sure what that taught me, other than how to remember my dreams. I’m not a dream-reader, though do find certain recurring themes curious, and occasionally dream vividly of people no longer in my life, who have died or are in some other way gone and inaccessible to me otherwise. There’s something quite beautiful about those dreams, as if in dreaming I can find forgiveness or mercy or grace that cannot be granted while awake.
I don’t know why this blog slanted in this particular direction.
My journal is leather-bound. We drove home today from our Christmas get-together with Kevin’s family, and beat the snow; I was thinking about writing tonight. I know exactly where the journal is waiting for me, on top of my dresser, with last year’s hopes and dreams waiting to be read and discovered, with last year’s anticipation and wondering waiting there too. Where have I travelled this year? What unexpected opportunities and challenges have come my way?
It feels, at present, that life comes down to time. That at its essence, time is what life is. We can’t call back lost time, and we can’t know how much time is left to us. We can only spend what comes to the best of our abilities, given the limitations and possibilities of our circumstances. I am glad and grateful for how I’ve gotten to spend my time so far, and how I’m spending it now. This coming year, I hope to explore, discover, dream, wonder, write, deepen relationships, and fear neither transitions nor challenges.
Onward.