Auld Lang Syne

On the first official (re: working) day of the new year, I find my mind wandering to the blank slate that seems to appear all around in the early days of January. The grey matter between my ears is beckoned by the somber hush of the grey sky, street, and fog outside my window, making me at one with the nothingness around me. But here’s where the panic sets in for me: I’m not supposed to be doing nothing! I’m supposed to be setting GOALS, DAMMIT.

Every year I arrogantly believe I can bend the next 364 days to my will if I only plan hard enough. If I throw enough energy at the unwritten year before me, I can extract a messy masterpiece by December at the latest and win the year for myself and those around me. Recently, though, I was acquainted with an idea that spoke to a shift in my feelings surrounding the new year. It had to do with the beauty and perfect emptiness of a clean canvas and how every attempt at making art is futile when trying to make the output more perfect than the canvas itself, clean and infinite in its possibility and potential. In order to create something, you must ruin the perfect nothing. The attraction of a clean slate is something I’ve felt keenly and I’d be lying if I said every word I’ve ever written didn’t seem to sully the empty page glowing before me at the onset of a task or piece of writing. Like footsteps on snow, our destruction proves we were here, but it’s hard to look at our rough and staggering proof of existence and not think the landscape would be more attractive if left undisturbed.

That thought would not have sat well with me just a few years earlier, but as I crested an achingly familiar hill earlier this week on a walk around my neighborhood I was able to see the beauty beside the terror in that perspective. The road, sky, and air were grey with the promise of precipitation, and the smell of distant burning leaves hung lightly to every corner of the midday fog around me. My surroundings were all at once dull and vibrant with the possibility of a new year, a fresh canvas the color of slate. But this time I resolved to respect the emptiness more than I have allowed myself to in years past.

I have spaces around my home to empty and purge of clutter.

I need to appreciate the moments in which doing nothing feels like the exact thing that’s needed.

I can listen to the music in silences and the see the art in the mundane, if only I respect what we spend so much of our time trying desperately to fill.

I can embrace the grey, the fog, the smoke, and enjoy it as it clears; thank it for revealing what’s to come my way this year like a gameshow door.

I can accept that creating art means simultaneously giving life to what hadn’t existed and destroying the perfection of an idea.

I can stop rushing to the empty canvases in my mind’s eye, feeling paralyzed by choice, and start accepting that every first brush stroke is equal parts destruction and creation. And the canvases in my mind are looming and many - they represent not only creative pursuits but objectives related to career, self, parenting, relationships, community, education, and just about every other facet of life there is to be working on all at once. So, I guess this year I wish myself and those around me an appreciation for all the potential the new year holds and the patience to see what the canvas reveals to us when it’s ready to be ruined by our best attempts and intentions.