groundhog year
January has come and gone, and, as in years past, I was bored. Tired, too—unsurprising, given that in the last half of last year, I spent four months training for the New York City Marathon, and then, after recovering from that, worked nearly every day to finish two freelance gigs while also working at my two adjunct jobs. And then I got sick. Yea!
The sky outside my window as I write these words is gray. This time of year seems to reveal gray as the essence of New York City. There are no leaves on the trees, nor any flowers; just gray sidewalks, gray buildings, gray skies. Yes, the days are getting longer; the sun now sets after 5pm and in another week will be rising before 7am. All the same, the days lack luster. I feel as gray as the spindly bare branches of the tree of heaven that stands next to my bedroom windows.
Last year I did a lot of things I have wanted to do for a long time. I had a chapbook published. Six days after my fiftieth birthday I ran the RBC Brooklyn Half Marathon faster than I’ve run any half marathon since I had children, and a few days after that, I finished my M.L.S. In November, I ran the New York City Marathon for the first time in nineteen years. Bit by bit over the course of the year, I made real progress in taking care of old crap and putting our home in order. I started going to bed at a regular time and made peace with the fact that I likely will never be a person who wakes before dawn to write poetry.
In many ways, this year will be much like last year, but without any big birthdays or graduations to celebrate. I’ll run the RBC Brooklyn Half Marathon and New York City Marathon again, but this year these goals no longer seem so splendid or formidable as they did last year. I’ll put in the work, show up at the start, and run the race, just as I did last year, but with this year’s weather, whatever that may be.
Most of the work of preparing for a big race is ordinary work—running a few or many miles nearly every day. Sometimes the miles are boring; occasionally the miles are glorious. Writing is similar—daily work, often boring, that eventually adds up to an essay, poem, or whatever. The need to show up for my writing every day, or nearly every day, is why for so long I wanted to be able to make time for it before dawn—and before the children wake, and meals need to be made, and other work needs to be done.
In Keep Going, Austin Kleon compares the creative life to that of Phil Connors in Groundhog Day; he observes that “truly prolific artists . . . have figured out a daily practice—a repeatable way of working that insulates them from success, failure, and the chaos of the outside world.” But Phil’s plight is instructive only to a point. For one thing, unlike the rest of us, he has escaped karma, getting a “reset” on everything but his own memory at the beginning of every day. For another thing, he finds liberation—that is, gets to February 3 with Andie MacDowell on his arm—not just by accepting the Sisyphean task of living and reliving the same day again and again—but by mastering that day, becoming a virtuoso of it.
However I might wish for it, and I often do, mostly unconsciously, I will never be a virtuoso of daily life! Luckily, I believe that liberation comes not through mastery, but through practice itself—boring, frustrating, occasionally illuminating practice.
A few weeks ago, listening to an episode of Fated Mates on fresh starts and new beginnings in romance, I thought, with disappointment—today is January 10, too late in the new year for a fresh start. Later in the day, it occurred to me that I don’t really need a fresh start; instead, this year I want to keep working on the practices I started last year—becoming an even stronger runner, getting rid of more old crap, and finding a regular time for writing (not before dawn—I need my sleep!). Meanwhile, I might feel stuck, but I’m trying not to worry about it too much. After all, there’s a reason Groundhog Day is set on Groundhog Day, a holiday that likely has origins in the old Celtic festival Imbolc, midway between the Solstice and Vernal Equinox, when it seems as though winter will go on and on and on and on and on. . . . No matter what the groundhog sees or doesn’t see today, sooner or later, spring will come.
