I’m usually very attuned to the passing of one year into the next, not to mention noting the change in decades, but this year not so much. The last couple of months have gone by in a flash of doctor’s appointments and phone calls, long texts and tender conversations. We have the recovery saying, “When you’re going through hell, don’t stop.” Agreed, in theory, but this hyper alcoholic/alanonic can use that phrase as permission to pick up speed right when I should be slowing down. Don’t stop, necessarily, but do pause. Do take notice of the world around me, the kind gestures, the laughter of children.

On Xmas eve, caught in a non-productive feedback loop in my brain while running an errand for work, I happened to look up, as beautiful chorale music played on the radio, to see literally 100’s of Canadian geese overhead, framed by the bare branches of a dozen trees. The beauty took my breath and unleashed tears for the pure simplicity and grace in their timeless flight. 

The natural world is a component of my spiritual resources. When I'm centered, I notice. When I'm centered, my spiritual sources include the ocean, majestic trees here in the Pacific northwest, a quiet moment. When I'm not, time and the clock become my higher power and there's never enough. I'm getting better at recognizing this old idea, but the problem with old ideas is that they are my ideas and I need to firmly (yet gently) remind myself that they aren't always accurate. 

I read a lovely article in the NY Times Style magazine of 11/17, about the week long event around cherry blossoms in Japan. The author, Hanya Yanagihara, writes, "The pleasure of seeing a cherry tree in bloom is the sorrow of knowing it will soon be over. To be in the presence of one is to be humbled before nature... a sakura (blossom) is a human life condensed into the period of a week: a birth, a wild brief glory, a death. It is to us what we are to the sweep of time -  a millisecond of beauty,  a memory before we are even through."  

As we enter a new year, and a new decade, I think about that sweep of time. Another quote, from James Woods' novel, Upstate:  In describing looking in the mirror, "a sixty-eight-year-old Alan Querry did not look back, but little Alan, ten-year-old Alan, twenty-year-old Alan. It was as if everything that had happened to him between ten and sixty-eight had happened in a very small set of rooms, as if childhood were just down the corridor and adolescence in the curious little cupboard off the kitchen, all of it near at hand, not decades away, not houses or streets away, but absolutely near at hand. Sixty-eight years - marriage, births, divorce, deaths, money - had taken no longer to live then the time it took to cross from one side of that corridor to the other." This is the exact conversation I shared with my friend on this new year's afternoon, as he comes to terms with his own mortality. This life went by so quickly. It went by so fast.

I feel that passing acutely as I enter the 8th decade I've been present for (1950's forward). I look ahead with hopeful anticipation to retirement, and I have entered the final portion of my life. I am showing up for the hard and focused conversations with my friend, both grateful and full of sorrow as we talk. I revel in reminiscing with longtime women friends, and marvel that it's been 50 years since we shared our first drinks, 20+ years since those early recovery talks, a decade since we sat in the same home group. Again and again I'm reminded to pay attention. When I allow time to become my higher power, I'm focused in the future rather than the sweet moments of today.

Happy new year, dear readers. If you take the time to pause today, or in these first days of 2020, what is it that you feel positive about from 2019? What do you look forward to welcoming in 2020? How will you remember to stay present in the glorious present, even if it doesn't feel glorious right now?