the year in review

I like these quiet days between Christmas and the new year. I don’t even mind the long hours of darkness, as long as the Christmas tree is lit up, and especially when the music of Nils Frahm is on the stereo. The night is like a vast, deep sea, and I like to swim. I read books I have no plans to write about, and then I sleep until well after the sun has risen.

I wish that I did not do so. I wish that I woke earlier, so that I wouldn’t miss even a minute of daylight, even the dim light of what has been a mostly overcast sky the past few days. I wonder if I am naturally a night owl, or if my late nights are simply a habit carried forward from my high school and college years.

I suppose I should take some time this week to think about what I’d like to do in the new year; I imagine I’ll regret it if I do not. But I am weary of my own desires. Buying and wrapping Christmas gifts and preparing Christmas meals as yet another wave of Covid infections washed over my city this week, I felt the futility of my projects. I don’t want to pursue any new projects or goals. I want just some regularity to my days and weeks. Perhaps I could begin by finding regular times to rise and go to bed.

In her Dharma talk “Whirlpools and Stagnant Waters,” Zen teacher Joko Beck describes a way of pursuing a goal without thinking too much about the end result. One simply does whatever eventually reaching the goal requires in the moment. As she says, “Anyone who seeks an educational degree needs to register in an educational program and take the courses, for example. The point is to promote the goal by accomplishing it in the present: doing this, doing that, doing this, as it becomes necessary, right here, right now. At some point, we get the degree or whatever.” So focusing on the regularity of my days and weeks doesn’t mean giving up on my big goals. It just means focusing on the time in which the necessary work actually happens.

Meanwhile, even during the irregular time of this year, I did manage to accomplish a few things.

1. I had eleven essays published at the Ploughshares blog, including a few that I am especially proud of: essays on Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, on How to Do Nothing, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Housekeeping, and on To Write As If Already Dead by Kate Zambreno.
2. Though I am happy to have sorted out some of my thoughts on Housekeeping, whose sadness has haunted me since I first read it in my twenties, I am not entirely satisfied with the conclusion of my essay on the novel. Though I tell myself that all conclusions are provisional, I wonder if what I wrote was true even when I wrote it. Afterward, I paused most of my first-person writing in public. A two-part seminar on “Surviving the First-Person Industrial Complex” with Alana Hope Levinson, hosted by Study Hall and Evan Kleecamp, helped me figure out what I want, at least for now. And so I began this newsletter.
3. I had two poems published this year: one in the inaugural issue of DEAR, and another in Ethel Volume 8, a gorgeous handmade zine. I wrote only one new poem, though. On the other hand, I had been worried that I would never be able to write another poem again (a worry that arises frequently, especially right after I’ve finished a poem), so the one that I wrote this year is not nothing.
4. I ran more than 650 miles and will probably end the year about 32 miles short of my goal of running 700. Does it matter that I didn’t meet my goal? Not really. I ran many more miles than I have in any year since the children were born. Next year, I will run more.
5. By doing this assignment, doing that assignment, doing this assignment, and so on as it becomes necessary, just as Joko Sensei advised, I have now completed half of the credits needed for my degree in library and information science, and I also started my first (very part-time) library job since college, in an area of librarianship I didn’t even know existed before August of this year. By this time next year I might even finish the degree. Or whatever.

What do you want to do in the new year? What did you do during this (what I assume was for you, too) irregular year? Tell me in the comments…. And many blessings to you for 2022. May all beings be at ease! xox Rachael