A New Year – A New Path?
As we are about to symbolically turn the page on yet another year, I am again conflicted by all the feelings I get around this time of year. I have never been big on the whole New Year’s business – particularly the excessive celebrations & the making of resolutions – since I have always been conflicted by the idea that changing a calendar will change everything.
“Time is an illusion.” ~ Albert Einstein
“Time is a very misleading thing. There’s no past and there’s no future. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.” ~ George Harrison
“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” ~ Dr. Seuss
To be honest, time have always been my mortal enemy. I have toted myself around with a watch on my wrist since I was about 7. There are clocks (plural) in every room in my house. I am forever looking at the time and always hurrying – and almost always late for the next thing. You know that song by Steve Miller with the lyrics “Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping…into the future?” That’s my constant earworm. You know the joke about being late for my own funeral? Yeah. That’s me. “Spend your time wisely.” Right – do you have any idea how much I have to do? I’d simply rather not have to think about time and the passing of it at all.
Yet, this year, I am more ready than ever to see the calendar change on 2013. This past year has been life-changing for me in just about every way imaginable. I have learned a great deal about myself, even at this ripe age, just when I thought I had it all figured out. Ha! Life is not static, as much as I’d like it to be sometimes. Change is, of course, inevitable. But I have had to warm up to the idea of change, being the control freak that I have always been.
“Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.” John Lennon
Truer words have never been spoken – life is constantly changing; it is ever evolving or, perhaps in some cases, devolving. Sometimes, change is good. Sometimes, not so good.
2013 was a particularly rough year of big life-altering changes. My dear hubby changed jobs for an alleged “better opportunity to go into the sunset with (as it was sold to him), only to have the plug pulled out months later. That was closely followed by him having a major heart attack, quad bypass open heart surgery, followed by months of cardiac rehab. The surgery, combined with his degenerative arthritis, has left him in the position of probably never being able to return to work in any regular capacity. So now he is forced into an early retirement. This, for a man who worked two jobs all of his adult life, is life-changing to say the least. Not only have I passed over the bridge this past year into my (ahem) more mature stage of life (my big “change”), but I have had to deal with all of this by his side.
I have a very dear sister who has gone through a VERY rough year for many personal reasons. As the oldest child of six I have always had a need to be able to fix all my siblings problems and make them feel better. There are things that are (surprise!) even beyond my control. But, going through all the pain and suffering with her, the end result is that we are now closer than ever.
Then, just before Christmas, we lost our other dear sister very suddenly to pancreatic cancer. She had the diagnosis barely a month and a prognosis and treatment plan barely a week when she simply passed away. This happened the day before we expected to see her for the first time in 2 years since she had moved out west with her hubby. Through of series of what we were calling little miracles, she had sold her home in 2 days, had an appointment already set up with the best doctor at the best cancer hospital in Boston, had two friends go out west to help them move their stuff back and had flight plans back to the east coast. And she was gone….just like that. Time vanished.
These were clearly the VERY BIG moments of the past year that have significant impact on my outlook on life, time & change. With that in mind, as we turn this final symbolic page of 2013, I am looking forward to a new year. I want the book to close on 2013. I need to be able to clear my head and look forward to the new phase of life we have unceremoniously been thrown into. Because if there is one lesson I learned this year, it’s that life is nothing but change. Good and bad. It leads us down many paths we never thought about traveling. Time really is an illusion. I pray for 2014 to be a year that the path becomes clearer and, dare I wish, just a little less bumpy.
Nada-ology 