No.190
It is easy to imagine how the ending of one year might crash into the beginning of another. We can compare with other past ending-beginnings, think back to how those last hours of a year were spent, anticipate the feeling that might accompany the first day of what we hope might be something more generous and more kind. Following this imagining, nature and its rhythms remain unmoved and unsurprised.
There are nights, sometimes, not so frequently now, where my brain fizzes in such a way that most of the hours are spent in wakefulness. This is a unlike-other-things mixture of exasperating, interesting, and exhausting, and each time I swear the next time it happens I will get out of bed—read, pace, write, other. I do not ever seem do this though, and instead lie fizzing and half-agitated in the darkness, listening to the evenly spaced and ocean-like breathing of the night-haired person next to me.
It always seems to be 2 a.m. and the room always appears halfway to daylight, though it is of course still thoroughly dark outside. As the eyes adjust to shadows my thoughts follow their outlines, the various shades of shade, resting on edges of furniture and forming disjointed clumps of sentence that might appear good or useful enough to merit writing down for later dissection, though this writing down also rarely happens. The hours between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. are not ruled by the regular laws, instead stopping and starting wherever they please, revealing both the most ludicrous and most dark of topics inside one’s mind, mashed together with a senselessness that is never located in the daytime.
When it comes to the daytime I forget and then remember how we will soon drive two hours to the coast, and look out over Willapa bay, a bay which people, over the course of uncountable years, have already looked out over an unfathomable number of times. It will likely rain for all of the days we are there, though this will feel refreshing and more like the elemental baptism of another year that I’d been craving—the reality of the period December 31st through January 3rd was a migraine, which caused me to entirely lose track of what any version of ending or beginning should mean, or how to orientate myself in the disorder of this month.
I’m finding increasingly that paying close and natural attention to the exterior world means that working is akin to sitting inside of a large swarming beehive while trying to thread the needles of words. In the past it has been threading needles of words while, say, sitting in an open field, or in a quiet room, or at the peripheral edges of commotion. It is hard to think properly, to write well, even to be well, while absorbing the commotion of everything, but I know there are many people for whom this is the more-often-than-not state of being, and I’m yet to figure out how to ease that state while still maintaining personal certainty that I am caring sufficiently. It is possible this isn’t possible.
My thoughts this morning bifurcated, river-like, half stubbornly my own and half those of other people, and it struck me how much now we default, often in boredom or evasiveness, to the thoughts of other people rather than following our own. The majority wake and turn immediately to the thoughts of other people, scrolling and slurping them up, muddying or completely flooding over any of their own that might have been clear, purposeful, of note, of importance.
We are instructed to be resolute at the beginnings of years—it is demanded loudly of us and from many different corners—and this instruction more often than not seems to be about absorbing the notions of others, or replacing and refuting the versions of yourself that have quietly been keeping you alive all year long. If January is to be resolved, then maybe it can be the kind of resolve that keeps you close to yourself, and protective of the smallest and more delicate thoughts your mind is carrying.
January 7th: We must practice thinking our own thoughts and perhaps the Pacific water will contain whales
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
As per usual and per often, new (newer? newest?) painted work by Australian artist Lucy Roleff, who can also be found in newsletters No.176, No.156, No.148, and No.136.
“This is a world we're making, after all, not just a jumble of noise.”
— Carol Shields, Various Miracles
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