I don't make New Year's resolutions but...

Photo used under Creative Commons from Noel Zia Lee.

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but I start a new journal pretty close to January 1 each year. It’s perfect, absolutely perfect to be starting a new journal today. Man. How rarely the internal and external clock match – but mine seems to today.

Work wasn’t bad this morning. Took the old guy to church and then on a long drive to find a place open for breakfast. He had me looking for a stop sign on Hwy 52, which will clue you in to why it was a long drive. In the end, the frustrated moments passed like the truck stop we were trying to find, and in the middle of a work day I got to go to church and hear surprising words attributed to the Pope about the purification of memory. I may have to look that up on the internet as my memory is so bad, but it was about not just remembering, but seeing truly, being truthful, and then letting the past be the past. The exit hymn was “Let Peace Begin With Me.”

Then I get home, the house is empty, and there’s a great editorial by Ellen Goodman, who is retiring.

The transition from one time of life to another is almost all that has filled my life the last month. It’s been a welcome break from dwelling on the daily details and it culminated with last night’s New Year’s Eve celebration where it was clear that the next generation has taken over and that family as it was is a thing of the past.

This realization came with an interesting set of emotions. I was with my husband’s family so I wondered what it felt like to him. We didn’t talk about it and I don’t know that we will. In fact, on the way home, neither of us said a word. I sensed that we were feeling similarly and I might find out; might not; depending on the mood we’re both in when we see each other next. The nicest thing was that, at least to me, coming home with him felt like coming home, like being home to each other.

Having just spent time with my “senior citizen” client, I was impressed by Goodman’s description of senior citizen as a “single demographic name tag that includes those who fought in World War II and those were born in World War II.” (By that description I don’t fit yet, and that’s okay by me.)

But what I really liked was this:

“The phrase that kept running through my head as I considered the next step was: “I’m letting myself go.” Yes I can imagine the response if a tweet came across the screen announcing, “Ellen Goodman has let herself go.” I can see the illustration: out of shape, lazy, slovenly, the very worst things you can whisper about a woman of a certain age.

But I love the idea of reclaiming that phrase. After all, where will you go when you let yourself go? To let this question fill the free space between deadlines in my life has been quite liberating. It suggests the freedom that can fuel this journey.”

Then she describes having begun her column when her daughter was 7 and ending when her grandson turns 7, writing about Gerald Ford and Barack Obama, going from a typwritter to a MacBook, having written through sending her daughter off to college and saying farewell to her mother. In other words, sharing her life as she went about her job. I did that in a different way this morning, and it is fine for now, but I’d like doing it better in writing. As Goodman says, “It has been a great gift to make a living trying to make sense out of the world around me. That is as much a disposition as an occupation.”

I think “trying to make sense out of the world around me” – as well as the world inside of me, my inner space – is my disposition. I don’t know why this has seemed a tricky disposition to have in the spiritual area. As my The Given Self comes out and readers of A Course of Love begin to seek me out a little more, I still wonder about this and my ability to blend what can seem like two different worlds. I still wonder how many people are ready to talk about it all with the same vigor and even reverence, and if, while that’s what I mean to do, I do it.

Last night, strangely enough, made me feel more ready to go for this new life. I’ve been calling this the "second half of my life" for the better part of this year. In fact, The Given Self, begun a year-and-a-half ago, held the stirrings of these second-half feelings. The transition had begun. Now, maybe, it is in full-swing.

Quotes from Ellen Goodman's last column, "Letting go," as seen in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, 1-1-2010, 10A.