January 4, 2022
Gleanings: Happy New Year!
- But COVID predictions, like election predictions, are often mostly about escaping from the feeling of unease and unreality and uncertainty that dominates the current moment.
- Was I really grieving the marriage all that time? All those jokes, that mistake of identifying myself as cold, or hard-hearted? Grief? Really? It makes me weep for the woman I have been.
- I am hesitantly stepping into 2022, much like stepping onto a frozen pond, not sure if the ice is solid enough to hold me.
- In 2021 I read 49 books, and I loved them all.
- …and our hearts each beat probably around 100, 000 times and the light of the day got the teeniest of a fraction longer, because this earth we all live on is orbiting a sun out in a galaxy and universe beyond that which we can even fathom.
- But as we all know, being top of the class means very little later in life, with how you might actually live your life.
- That’s a gift of living in pandemic times, for those of us who’d imagined we had more control over things — we get to see and feel and know how precarious our plans were all along.
- In any case, I don’t think any book I’ve written has ended up being what I thought I was going to write.
- It’s possible that R will never get the cookie he wants since he’s fixated on a memory of a variation that cannot be repeated. I should also add that the challenge is entirely in my own head. It doesn’t matter to him whether I make the cookies or not. But if I make them, he will offer an opinion. That is our dynamic.
- What makes a house, a home? For starters, I would hope we can all agree it doesn’t have to be a house.
- I think, in some alternate universe, if the coat had been fine and never wrecked by moths, I wouldn’t want to wear it.
- Resolutions tend to be removing things from our life or ‘improving’ ourselves or how we do things. Bunk to that. Instead I want to focus on what I can add to my life to make it better, happier, more fulfilling. I want to focus on what I can do to bring more carefree joy to my life.
- This makes me question my own life’s ambition to write a biographical novel of Harriet Vane. But maybe that’s different because she is already a fictional character? I will have to ponder this…
- Today I whittled my inbox down to the essentials. I chased payments and worried over invoices. I put on a pot of beans. I tried to move gracefully from working in a quiet apartment with a scrappy mouse for company to navigating the converging energies of five whole humans at the end of their long days.
- I’ve found that these types of reading “goals”—the resolution to read books that challenge my expectations and complacency, that provide unexpected pleasures, that a small business believes in—have enriched my life in a way that “read all the XX nominees” or “read all the bestsellers” or “read XXX number of books” doesn’t.
- If I were to pick a word for the upcoming year, it would probably have to be contingency.
And one more (extra special) post! Kathy, whose excellent blog is Little Yellow Bungalow, wrote a really kind and generous post about her experience as part of Blog School’s MAKE THE LEAP course in September. My next course starts on the first of February, in just under a month. Sign up today to join us!
