NEW YEAR’S NOTE:
I’M MOVING TO SUBSTACK! This blog will eventually be removed, but please do go to Substack and read me there! Bring a friend… this just might be the start of something amazing!
https://open.substack.com/pub/docshrop/p/on-the-calendaring-of-life?r=2rr5f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
On the “Calendaring” of Life
We are only five days into the new year, but rather than talk of resolutions, this year I am focused on Time – in what feels like a new and weighty way.
In the new year, we use calendar as a verb without much reflection. We plan our year, seemingly on autopilot. For examples, I am calendaring a trip to the Midwest for a niece’s graduation. I am calendaring camping trips and fly-fishing excursions and hosting the July 4 long weekend. With a stroke of a pen, I am six months out into my life, thinking of the fun of living life with ever an eye on figuring out how to pay for it all (a bigger concern for me since I effectively quit my job in December).
But more than money, or goals, or celebrations. I’m an extrovert; I love a party. I (like to think I) am realistic about goals. And I’m not afraid of being poor. I’ve been all varieties of it. Including homeless and sleeping in my car for a wee stretch.
Time – as I understand it – isn’t measured in financial quarters for me
– though my financial advisor would say I should reconsider
Time for me isn’t measured in semesters
– even though I am still a professor and these calendars are provided for me
Time for me isn’t about legacy
– I am childfree, so my calendars are neither filled with soccer practices and proms, nor the countdown to empty nesting; I have the luxury of Auntie and Fairy Godmother duties only
I don’t measure Time in personal or professional accomplishments
– sometimes just crawling into January, exhausted but alive (maybe with a half martini in hand) is success enough.
But The Thing with which I mark time is the way I believe most people do, even if they get bogged down with the calendaring of life.
Which is to say in story.
I understand Time in narrative.
I think most humans do too.
The year I graduated from college I have no idea what I “calendared” beyond passing Statitics so that I could walk in May. I don’t remember a single thing about that class or its exam, but I do remember that my grandmother left a message on my answering machine that said her entire Stitch and Bitch group at church was praying hard for me to pass. (Whose to say it didn’t work.)
1996 was the year I moved to CA with $28.17 in my bank account and a Texaco card. There were so many stories to follow that.
1989 was the year I decided it was OK to forgive myself for not liking someone just because they were family. (Being related was not a pass for being a bigot.) Those stories, while kept secret, were integral to my identity. And continue to be.
2005 was the year I lost my grandad and made the worst decision of my marriage – to move into his old home as a DIY house situation. We lived in it while renovating it, working crap jobs with long hours and dealing with unhinged people of all sorts. (It has since become a point of marital pride; if we can survive that, we can survive anything.) So. Many. Stories.
In 2017, as a PhD student, my life was often marked in pages and not in days. And as I was mining and refining stories for a large project, my husband consistently showed me and my chemo brain one of life’s greatest acts of kindness – which is to pretend you haven’t already heard that story before.
In 2008, I lost my dad after years of heartache associated with congestive heart disease.
In 2024, I lost my sister to a brain tumor.
All of these events involve the happiest, most enriching stories of my life, even though attached to some of the saddest moments. In January of each of those years, I didn’t make resolutions. I can only remember the gratitude I felt – still feel – for being so lucky to have these people and stories in my life.
And these stories last longer than lifetimes.
So I am starting this year with capital-G Gratitude. Not a personal scoresheet of accomplishments and failures, but gratitude for living a life that includes all of the above.
I started by writing thank you notes.
Thank you notes for holiday presents are a must for me. And they will be hand-written until I no longer have that capacity because I feel strongly about the weight of such actions. But then I started writing other thank you notes. Then letters. Long ones that I might never mail – I am still distilling that idea.
A thank you note isn’t about performing some expected piece of etiquette, but about recognizing someone for thinking of you. In a world where it is easy to dismiss others, to not think of others, or own the consequences of word and deeed, I think that’s quite a special thing, a note of thanks. Even when writing a note to someone I don’t particularly care for, I am choosing words that are honest and kind.
And, you know of course, that if you are writing a thank you note to a person you don’t like, there are stories there too. Gratitude should be shown for all of the stories. Stories make us who we are, even those guided by villains. Sometimes especially so.
So here we are, five days into the new year, and I am feeling okay about it. I have anxieties of course – about my bills, my family, my country – I’m pragmatic and not blind to the evils in this world.
But I’m not a goal-setting over-achieving optimism-oozing cheerleader “let’s crush this” kind of person. I am more of a “let’s pour a drink and make a few plans and enjoy how our stories develop” kind of woman.
I am coolio with the new year because I am open to new stories.
The good, the bad, the ugly.
They are all coming.
But let’s write them together, shall we?
Derelict Debutante 