New Year; New Lessons

The first few days of a new year always have me considering beginnings. I suppose that's normal; maybe everyone does it. But I've realized this year, and probably should have realized it a lot sooner: as far as I'm concerned, beginnings are always the hardest part. People like to tell you it's the endings that are tough, but they're wrong. Endings will always happen to you. No matter what or when or how - at some point, even if you stay completely and totally still, an ending will show up. Beginnings? Those are choices.

I feel like the past couple of years have been uniquely challenging for everyone in some way or another. So, to start 2022, I find myself trying to decipher the lessons that came from the past couple years of this decade that did as history tends to do: repeated itself. It isn't necessarily another jazz age, and prohibition doesn't appear to be raising its head, but these 20s - much like the last, came in roaring.

With the world at max volume, ironically, the most important lessons I have learned in the recent past have come from the quiet. I learn the most when I sit in the silence to read, when I take a drive to nowhere and play the same song on repeat, with a cup of coffee before the sun comes up or after it's gone down, in the classroom while my students get lost in a book. I learn the most, I think, when I take the time to translate my experiences. 

So - those lessons I mentioned: 

First, and foremost: Your happiness is always, completely, up to you.

I feel like this is a common thread in my life, something I need to remind myself of more often than I'd like. If I don't provide myself with happiness, if I don't take the opportunities to experience joy when they arrive, no one else is going to do it for me. As Shel Silverstein once wrote, "all the magic I have known / I've had to make myself". So...find something that you love, and then make it magic. You're the only one that can.

Fairytales don't show you that the hard stuff - it keeps coming. When the credits roll, or the story ends, the dragons are always defeated, and the on-screen kiss is everything hopeful. And sure...that's lovely, but it doesn't just stop there. The dragons are always going to be there, and even on the happy days you still have to fight them. You're going to pick up, dust off, and move forward - because no matter what, you still have to be a person. Sometimes that's hard, but sometimes too - there's a beauty in the ability to stand back up, in still being human even when you feel sort of broken. Because...we all are; you're never truly alone that way. 

You can't control other people's choices, nor can you control their reactions to yours. People are not always going to agree with you; they're not always going to understand you. Even the people who love you. But I think the most important thing to remember when you disagree with people whom you love, people who love you, is that, while I might not agree with you, and I might not understand you, I'm always on your side. I might not want what you want, or know why you want it, but I want good for you. Sometimes we just...aren't going to agree about what that is. And it's a hard truth to swallow, knowing you're right when someone else knows they're right too. Sometimes the only choice there is is to love them anyway. 

The things we want and the things we need are not always the same. I wish they were. I wish that the things we need would forever manifest themselves as the things that we want. But they don't. I often want things that I shouldn't want and need things that I wish I didn't. This has been one of the most difficult pieces of...well of a lot of my life. Just because I want it, doesn't mean I need it. Even if I don't want it, that doesn't mean I don't need it. Sometimes they're lessons, sometimes hardships or struggles, sometimes wishes on stars that didn't come true. It would be a lovely thing, in the moment, to get everything that you wish for, but then...I often find an inability to see the forest for the trees. And if I got all of the things that I wished for...I wouldn't deserve the things that I earned.

Connecting to other humans will always be the thing that matters the most. I especially find this in teaching, but it applies to most of life generally as well. There is rarely anything more important than making connections with other human beings. Teenagers won't want to learn from you if they don't feel like you care about them. Friends or family won't act like friends or family if they don't know that you're in their corner. The things that bring me joy would rarely exist if it weren't for my ability to connect to others - to share a favorite song, commiserate over something that hurts the both of us, understand the same nuances of a film scene, find beauty in the same night sky. It's such a lovely thing to find something in another human that is also in you. 

Sometimes, and this is a hard one, you have to let it hurt. I've learned that there are moments and there are people and there are circumstances in my life that are going to hurt me, that, sometimes, are going to devastate me. And those things are not always fixable. They're not always in my realm of control. And sometimes...the only thing that there is to do, is to feel the pain that they cause. Cry it or scream it or sigh it out. Just...learn to breathe through it. Because the only other option is to drown in it. Emotional strength, much like physical strength, is practiced. It's built over time. If you want it to stop hurting, you first have to learn to breathe through the pain. 

I've learned many lessons since the twenties came roaring in, many lessons before, and I lack enough wisdom that I will never be short of lessons to learn. I hope 2022 brings peace. I hope it brings a calm and a gentle adjustment of the world's volume knob. I hope we all learn lovely, difficult lessons this year. There's something refreshing about a new set of challenges - even if we don't yet know what they are. So I'll catalog the lessons I've gathered, and cross my fingers that I can make use of the wisdom they've given. 

Happy New Year. I hope you learn something too.