Last January, I set out to write something
everyday. I bought a beautiful pack of Moleskin journals—one of each month, one
page dedicated to each of the year’s 365 days.
The resolution was mostly to get back into the
habit of daily writing, but I also had the intentions of using the daily recaps
as a way to observe and reflect on my current state of affairs. With the
exception of four days in June, I achieved my resolution and have a thorough
record of how every single day of 2013 was spent.
Early in December, I read through every single
day of the year. I read about each day that was sunny in Seattle (more than you
would think), recapped each happy hour, dinner with friends, and any extra
meaningful conversations. Each job interview, every awkward/semi-terrible date
(the handful of goodies, too), and a daily account of a love story grace the
smooth ivory pages in my messy, loopy script. Broad threads of cliché seasonal
transitions knit the months together into what appear as a dozen neat chapters.
I have all of this—all of this reminiscence and
nostalgia—and with only a couple of hours left in the year, all that I really
want to do it rip up and throw away the notebooks.
I wish I could say I found some grand insights
into myself and the direction I’ve taken/am going, but really I just have a lot
of words on record that maybe weren’t meant to live on past the moment in which
they occurred.
It’s the cumulative dinners, happy hours and
conversations that lead to friendships. It’s the pattern of feelings (good or
bad) that, over time, prompt you to act. The little moments in between that fully capture
the greater meaning are the moments we tuck into memory. The ones which are
easy to draw from when one of our senses is reengaged to provoke the memory.
But all of the others--the day to day highs and
lows—I’m not convinced they’re designed to be remembered with such clarity.
This is the time of year when nostalgia is
practically shoved down our throats. The pressure to live up to traditions of
yesteryear and create monumental moments during the holiday season is incredibly
high. Juxtapose that with the
promise of a new start with the New Year – your chance to “press the reset
button,” to swear that this year you’ll do better and challenge yourself in new
ways.
The combination of nostalgia and future-forward
introspection lends to making it nearly impossible to just be in the present.
Social media doesn’t help either. Facebook
encourages me to “Remember the best parts of 2013” or to list the “Top things
you want to remember” in my About Me section. Not unlike the goal of writing
something down everyday, Facebook has successfully recorded our lives in as
much detail as the day-to-day minutia.
The idea of scrolling through my seven years of
Facebook records is horrifying, it seems like the ultimate exercise of
narcissism and borderline self-deprecating. Yet it’s right there for all of us
to mindlessly scroll through and look at our lives any time we’d like.
My pride got in the way of simply throwing away
December’s notebook, I was too close not to just finish it. Instead, this
month’s pages are filled with no more than 10 words per page. Many days just
have a single word written on them: a mantra, a statement of gratitude. Nothing
resembling a daily rundown.
The writing during the year became secondary to
the recap. It instead became end of day reminder of what had already transpired
that I had no way of undoing.
In 2014 I will do the opposite. I won’t live in
perpetual nostalgia, nor will I live in perpetual planning. It’s going to be a
day-by-day thing and it most likely won’t be documented anywhere.
Sorry, future grandkids, no juicy goodies to
discover in the pages that might make up bits of my 2014.
Wishing you all a transformative and spontaneous 2014.
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