What the year has taught me

Dispatch #46

Note: No, I didn’t skip a number. The number before this one has ceased to exist for me, as has the number after this one – formerly a favourite number of mine. Like numbers on some elevators my numbers lie. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

A person meets many teachers in her life. Some of them even call themselves that. Some of those teachers are kind and generous, some are cruel and parsimonious. Some are quixotic, some most intentional. I have decided that the best way to consider 2024 is as a teacher. Even the harshest teachers impart something of worth in my opinion. To consider the year thus will save me from washing it all with the same terrible paint colour.

What have I learned from ‘24?

Friendship is one of the most precious treasures of my life

As two of the brightest stars in my friend firmament fade I notice most acutely what their brilliance has meant to me. And as I share this grief at their dimming with other dear friends, our bonds become stronger and brighter too. When I did more counselling than I now do I would sometimes have reason to ask a client if they would be done with their grief, they must be done with their love. Were they willing to do that? Never. Yes, grief changes over time, but it does not lessen. It has a different timbre is all but the song goes on.

If my hands are busy my spirit quiets

Whether I’m working on a quilt or a painting or making a pie, my thoughts settle and calm. To be making, especially with the hands, is to drop into the present moment. Some people call it being in the flow but I believe it is our natural state. We have made it exceptional because we are so often poking around in the past in either regret or longing, or leaping into the hope and fear of the future that we have forgotten the simple most excellent fact of being in the now. I have been slowly but surely decluttering my digital life and so turning more and more to the pleasures of the hands (yes, that works too!) . As I do this I am staying out of doom scrolling and instead deciding what I can do about something rather than worry about it.

As I begin so shall I go on

I affect every space I enter and so I am learning (painfully) to check my energy and intention as I enter. Often it is just a matter of moving more slowly, and that speed is indeed aggression. By simply moving at a lesser speed the quality of my energy shifts in a positive way.

I cannot move mountains, but I can pick up a spade and move what I can carry

In this time of dangerous leaders, terrible corporate practices, climate disaster and general dissolving of ethical behaviour I may feel helpless but I can see what needs to be done in my own neighbourhood, what people around me need some care, who might be hurting, or who might be willing to join others in peaceful resistance to this hateful movement. I can support with time or money groups that are speaking the truth to power. I can share the knowledge I have gained over my years. I can resist the compulsion to roll up under my quilt and hide in despair. I can resist the frozen death of hopelessness for when we cease to move we die, therefore when we move we cease to die.

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine

To quote the proverbs – it does us much good to look for merriment in our lives. Perhaps some of the big pleasures have evaded me this year but I have had much to be merry about. I’m so enjoying all my relationships – my dearest fella, my children and step-children, my grandchildren and the children of my heart, my friends and my siblings. I know when things get grim that I can read David Sedaris or watch an episode or two of Creature Comforts and laugh at the wonderful absurdities of life. Simple pleasures are not so simple sometimes when I get caught in the dramas, the opera of my life. So I have to have them at the ready, the antidote to the dire circumstance. Soldiers sing in the trenches, surgeons joke in the operating room. The sacred clowns like Charlie Chaplin have been known to encourage those under the most extreme of regimes. We are entering the dark times and the light or spirit of the human spirit glows at its most brightest with humour.

So happy new year I hope! Thanks for hanging around and reading my thoughts, and especially sharing your own. It means a lot to me.

I’m coming to you early this week and I may also appear on Friday or I might not... I’m working on part three of my life in work... so you have that to look forward to.