#19
At noon a dear friend directed you to “recollect all the lessons you learned this year”, so here goes yet another attempt to parse through the days that have been. You love reading the aphoristic lists that other people make but it would be embarrassing to try to write one, so here’s the newsletter as usual. There’s been so much discontent of late, but is 13:13 as you type this—an arbitrary sign to which you’ve attached a significant amount of meaning—which brings hope. What feels like a state of immutable inbetweenness will perhaps get rolling again. (These sentences move through your head like a gangly teenager walking down the school corridor.)
A small cause for celebration: You’ve now sent out this newsletter every single month of the year! This is important to acknowledge because little else holds you accountable to whatever this thing called writing is.
Some days you’ve felt so stuck this year, and the reason has mostly been this: the task went against your intuition, and you didn’t know how to communicate your discontent, and it simply did not occur to you to ask for help. There has been so much waiting around with stoppled senses for the solution to graciously present itself to you. Mercifully, you have found people who are generous with their time and their hearts—you just have to ask.
In many ways you have unravelled. A few weeks ago, you were digging through old journals again, and it was so painful to have evidence of all your prejudgements and misconceptions over the years sitting in your hands, tangible, sealed in writing. Everything you write today is in some ways haunted by the things you don’t know yet and which you will only learn tomorrow—all of it haunted already by the retrospection of the future self. Still, it doesn’t stop you from being who you are.
One bright friend says that the things you make up in your head are still real, which helps. How does one accrue such suspicion? And how to unlearn it? At least it’s easier to forgive past versions of you now that you see how much you simply couldn’t see. It’s a marvel: the wounds of childhood are beginning to grow an impossibly soft layer of skin.
All of this sounds terribly dreary but really, it’s been yet another year of beautiful friendships, some very good meals (special mention to zucchini fries) and some terrible ones, a fair amount of reading, and just enough travel to break you awake. Not to mention the daily lessons in caregiving, responsibility, receptivity—
Finally, to honour sweet winter sunlight, these paintings by Duri Baek: