A year and its shadow

Friday Fragment #40

A year feels like too large a measure of time to comprehend in the contemplation of what it is that we do with our lives. The calendarisation of a life, organised by separated days, weeks and months, but lived as connecting seconds, minutes and hours is an attempt to assert order on fluidity itself, as though time were a piece of paper to be folded at our will. Formulating ideas and plans at an arbitrary January start point is an act of ambition that for many the mind must keep vague, for we know such ideas to be specious; hopeful at best. What lies ahead for a year has always been capable of overwhelming me, demanding of so many hypothetical steps that can so swiftly be deemed ridiculous by each subsequent twenty-four hours. I think each of us chooses to live in awe of just one day and that is either the day that we lived yesterday, are living today or will live tomorrow. Fernando Pessoa wrote of always living in the present: ‘The future I cannot know. The past I no longer have.’ I feel close to this sentiment, though know that the past forms the shape and rhythm of today, and all of its first thoughts and actions. Tomorrow’s great power (and terror) is that it can completely transform that shape and rhythm, with or without my steer. The celebration of a new year has always seemed like the most perverse bonfire of yesterdays, all stacked and about to be torched. That crossover midnight moment, as 31 flips over to 1, and December resets to January, is one that I will never not mourn. I read of resolution making and of people selecting their ‘meaningful words’ with which to focus the oncoming year and I’m left slightly cold and uneasy. It’s not to say that I think less of those who indulge in looking forward, but more that I ache from keeping company, as though two people, with the most desolate parts of myself. Rebecca Solnit describes hope as, ‘a commitment to possibility in the face of uncertainty’. As such, optimism and pessimism are not so much opposite states, but two sides of the same coin – measures of certainty, not hope or despair, but a confidence that things will be good or bad. I hope that there will be water in the glass, whereas the optimist is concerned more with measuring it half-full; the pessimist to declare it half-empty. I accept the turn of the year in the same way that I do the turned page: with traces of the last few hundred words still faintly visible through the paper, and with no more than a peripheral glance to the black and white patterns of the page ahead. On this most recent thirty-first day of December, I walked home, close to midnight, content at my wife’s side; with a smile imagining the modest happiness of my daughters, each marking the year’s end in their own way; grateful to know that my mother was peacefully asleep in her home; that my father-in-law was in the embrace of his eldest daughter; that my dearest friend had made it home from hospital to be with the love of those he loved most. I walked home: happy, but fearful – respectfully uncertain of all that tomorrow and its successors might yet bring, acquiesced to the anxiety of naming the end of one thing in order to mark the beginning of another, trying to keep off the cold, yet with only this old and well-worn coat of melancholy for warmth.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.