While I welcome the advent of a New Year, the platitudes and clichés that mark its passing feel stunted and silly. The opportunity to pause and ponder is of great value to me, inviting the deep and introspective examination of who I am and where I am at, but if I am to be completely honest, I prefer the spontaneity and possibility of plunging headlong into next. While I am resolute in personality, tenacious and plucky, resolutions seem to serve as empty promises. My preference is, simply to fling open with abandon the doors of the New Year, eyes wide and heart open, trusting in a Creator who does all things well.
In this life, there are no promises of perfect. There is not enough performing and producing that will assure the attainment of easy. Life is full of gaping holes. But that is the point, because character is not developed in mastery and tranquility. The soul is engaged and refined in its encounters with adversity and chaos. The cracks and crevices simply make room for the Light of the World to abide.
I prefer the unpredictability of vulnerable to the tidy symmetry of my own resolve. I like the mess, the beauty of misplaced, like the moon’s appearance at noontide. It softens a rigid heart and allows for inclusivity in love and service. The heroes in my story, the humans who I esteem for their courage and grace, are those who got there not through ease and abundance, but through grit and insufficiency. It is to their example that I look in the face of this New Year. To forget the past in order to birth something new is counterintuitive to me, for I am certain new beginnings are forged in the furnace of the past not in its desertion. My desire for today is not the creation of a new life for myself, it is, quite simply, to fully dwell in the beautiful complexity of the life I already have. In this elegantly choreographed dance of human existence, we mustn’t have everything figured out to move forward.
And so while I will admit to feeling a bit less accomplished and hip given my aversion for to dos, I am, nonetheless fully engaged in to bes, because that is where the magic lives. Today, even as the world fully affirms small and quiet femininity, I will live in the outspoken complexity that defines my spirit.
For me, to focus on simple resolutions would be to limit myself in a world of limitless possibilities and lavish grace. My aim in this moment is to live in the abundance of life with the knowledge that every obstacle and every mistake is purposed preparation for borderless trust in the One who is making ways in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The Creator of the Universe is doing something new, and my only responsibility is to race toward it, trusting every detail to Him, for He is unbound by my resolutions and expectations.