Friday, December 29, 2006
My New Year’s Ritual
My New Year’s Day ritual runs counter to the self-improvement paradigm of the conventional resolution. It isn’t painless, but it produces fast results. This is how it works. I sit or lie down in a quiet, dark place and allow my thoughts to drift. Once my mind is calm an imaginative process of erasure begins. The idea is to let go of everything.
It starts with an inventory of small things: mere knickknacks, sentimental treasures, old sweaters. These minor souvenirs of the events and people of my life flow away from me. I give them up almost without wincing, because their vanishing is the final blossoming of so many half-forgotten pleasures. Other objects of everyday use are harder to let go. My briefcase goes, and my watch, shoes, and dress shirts. These expressions of my self are canceled. The furniture marches away, chair after stiff chair, and our appliances, too, falling heavily off into darkness. And all the work I did to pay for these things was for naught. The effect is not just loss, but eradication. A world evolves in which the dear, familiar things no longer exist.
Once you’ve become skilled at this terrible game, the losses seem to accelerate even as you register the precise devastation of each blow to your identity. You lose your computer and all the information stored in it, and you need a moment to recover, to face the fact of a world without all of that, without your email and the Internet. Your car disappears, and from now on you have to walk everywhere or catch a bus.
What goes next will depend on you. You have so much more to lose. Your life insurance, your health insurance, your pension. Your bank account empties, the notes and coins sucked away by the vacuum mouth of a wind that keeps humming, snatching your credit cards and driver’s license. Eventually it will slip the eternal wedding ring from your finger. Maybe your jazz LP collection or your stamps or dolls or model trains go before your money, maybe after. For me, it isn’t until very near the end that my books fly away; and later a few pages I’ve written, worthless to anyone else, are torn from my trembling hands. And all of these things, I know (even as I fight to keep them), were lost before I let go of them in a dying world I’m still learning how to love.
Our house has burnt to the ground, and I’m out in the cold, realizing that I’ve lost my job, too. And I can see already the horrible, slow procession of friends and family. One by one they reach the door, their faces turning from me before I can say goodbye.
I need time to deal with the loss of our dog and our cats, even though I already know their fate. Losing my brothers and my sister—those losses take time to mourn, because there are the regrets to give up as well as the love. The disaster proceeds, from pain to deeper, less nameable pain, until I myself must begin to vanish, and all my memory, my secrets, my education, the story of my life, erased as if by Alzheimer’s. Everything I own, and more than what I own. I let them go. I have no choice.
But after there is nothing—nothing to mourn or regret, no vision with which to see, no thought, no mind—it is time to let everything and everyone return, one by one, afresh, out of the Void, the miraculous gifts. They all rush back, overwhelming me with a world I still hardly know. Then even the least significant object speaks: New Year’s resolutions focus on the self in the narrowest sense; but your problem is that you take too much care of yourself. You haven’t loved the world enough. You cling so selfishly to life that your grasp is deadly. Let go, let go.
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A random pick from more than 460 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Joe Chaney -- My New Year’s Ritual / More essays by Joe
Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
Heather Curlee Novak -- More essays by Heather
David James -- More essays by David
Elizabeth Van Jacob -- More essays by Elizabeth
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, Ken Smith, Heather Curlee Novak, David James, and Elizabeth Van Jacob.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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