Elephants, Cookies, and the Holidays

This is not how the year was to end, with memories tucked into cramped places, with so many arcs left unfinished, so many pieces left unplaced. Somewhere between tea too strongly brewed and nights too often spent awake I lost hold of the finer points of goals, and amidst missed deadlines and deflated hopes realized that I would simply have to learn to live five steps behind my perfect agenda, realized that Armageddon does not come with a Christmas card sent two days after Christmas or a host of unfulfilled wishes or a batch of cookies forgotten in the oven. I can do this, bit by bit. Performance isn't everything. I can afford to breathe.

I have to breathe.

New Year's Day resolutions being more of a collective nod to abandoned pursuits than anything else, I have none to make. Instead, these last two months of two thousand fourteen have slowly shaped an impression for two thousand and fifteen—this is what I want, this is what I have to remind myself of during these wee hours when rationale has all the stability of a dust-crumbled foundation: 

the grace to stand when I can stand and to kneel when I ought to be kneeling, the grace to fall flat on my face as I have so many times already and in the silence after the thud feel the persistence of my heartbeat and remember to get up and go on; sleep at night, every night, instead of the bending of routine to a too-taxing job; the chance to bake pies for people who need it and to not fear being called out while they are still in the oven; patience and persistence and hope to get through the long months between what is Now and what has become Then; matches enough to light my candles.

This, this, is my New Year. And right now I'm too weary to do more than crawl into bed and pray for enough strength to get up in several hours and go pour myself out amidst what has begun to feel like an emotional war zone, but even so there is enough of that vision laced through these days surrounding me that I can draw a deep breath over the dregs of my now-cold chai and murmur to the empty bedroom around me, "You can do this, you'll be okay." One night at a time, one day at a time, one hour at a time—and somewhere between those infinite expanses of weariness and aching there are pockets enough of warmth and belonging and love to make all of the pain bearable, and fortitude worth it.

Coffee Fumes, Tantrums, and a Morbid Sense of Humour

There is a heck of a long list of things that I will never be tacked to the right inside door of my mental junk cabinet, and at the top of that list in the very first slot, making the cut above 'sociopath', 'homicidal maniac', and 'Hitler', is 'matutinophile'. Morning and I were not made for intimacy, and there's nothing that sets the day wrong quite so much as rolling out of bed at an indecently punctual hour, after four hours of sleep, with exhaustion puffing my eyelids and ringing my eyes.

However.

There are consolations, small though they be. One of them is coffee. Another, fickle though it may be, is morning sun. And hot showers. And the chance to dash away to work without a panicking fit because of having overslept my alarm yet again. And a Celestial Seasonings tea tin, unexpected, tucked into the box.

Yes, I'm trying to make myself feel better about this whole "early rising" thing. Unfortunately, it's not really working. Because I practically dozed all through the shower, and I'm off to work in a bit of a panicking fit anyway because that on-my-feet-nap cost me a princely sum of ten minutes and I needed those ten minutes. Honestly, why do the minutes from seven-fifteen to seven-fifty have to go so swiftly?

But. Fortunately, I still have coffee. And my legs move. It's always possible I might have waked and found myself paralyzed from the waist down; things like that must happen somewhere, and I am a very lucky girl indeed because it has yet to happen to me.

Have a splendid Wednesday, people.

Growth

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you.,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete. 

—by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ