This is the time of year we’re all supposed to resolve
ourselves to change – making promises to ourselves that we hope to keep.
I’m good for a lot of promises, and then spend the year
struggling to make them happen.
But change in my life has always been something that comes
upon me whether I intend it or not, the next stumbling step in some direction I
vaguely intend to go, an uncertain, precarious step that I am often relieved
when the heal and toe find solid ground upon which to land.
It is hugely difficult to resolve anything about anything
when each step in life comes as a reaction to what the toe might stumble over
or bump into or might jerk back from – life being a process of anticipation and
reaction, never a certainty.
Routine – such as my Sunday morning laundry – is a comfort
zone, a place of refuge where I can almost predict the future and what to
expect, and find more solid ground than during the rest of life where each step
is a reaching out into the unknown and the immense relief of landing on
something that doesn’t fall out from under me.
Over the long years, no resolution has ever come to fruition
except as a backward glance at what I hoped would be, and what I managed to
salvage from any promise I made myself when starting out on this trek into and
out of the unknown.
What I vow most to accomplish always comes from steps I take
inside myself, that constant struggle to make the ticks of the clock inside of
me keep pace with the real clicks of the real world – which often as not I have
failed to keep time to.
It is a great concept to be that soul who marches to his own
tune, but it’s a horrible to be so out of harmony with what actually transpires
as to not accept what happens next.
I don’t believe in fate as most people would define it. But
I do understand that I need to direct my foot somewhere and be conscious of
each step I take to make certain that it lands somewhere solid so that I can
take the next step with the confidence of knowing where I’ve been.
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