It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case. – Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The New Year (both the Gregorian and lunar variants) has started off on a rather wistful, though at times, hopeful note. It is often easy to dismiss remembrances such as these as artificial boundaries. What, if at all, is the real difference between December 31, 2010 and January 1, 2011? Between February 1 or 2? Life has a way of providing continuity that has nothing to do with the calendar pages or the earth’s rotation. Most of the time we live according to our own patterns. What was my life like during four years of undergrad? Of four years and counting of yet more graduate schooling? These dates are at best, seem just good excuses for rest.
Last Friday, as I listened to two people excitedly tell me about upcoming adventures in their budding legal careers, I felt myself also asking the question: why am I not feeling the same for me? The answer of course is that I am done with that phase. I am in the middle of the kind of “life” I have chosen for the time being. After the excitement wears down, and one is confronted with the daily grind, the only thing left to do is to alternately be patient and to rush headlong against what is being offered. That applies to a lot of things, both trivial and not – patience to research on that one arcane point and yet defiantly embrace the larger uncertainty offered by such an overwhelming task called a dissertation, patience to to wait for the right person to come along and yet fiercely demand that the universe must keep on giving. To paraphrase Chesterton -- if I live, I must be made to bleed or there is no poetry in living.
The message is that life happens, the shit along with it. But in the end, it happens for the best. Until that time comes, I think we do not appreciate enough what these dates tell us. The promise of a new year is not a delusion – for to live without a sense of promise is to barely live at all. What the turn of the calendar does is to allow us to momentarily pause and see there is much regeneration that lies ahead. And it is this hope which allows us to live the lives we’re meant to have.
