The Lesson Of 2009
Posted by Jared | Posted in Autobiologic | Posted on 08-01-2010
‘m pretty good. My broken ankle is healed and I can almost walk like a normal person. I’ve got a graphic novel with a great deal of promise, finally making headway on my novel WAY OF THE DODO, and am frustrated at my dayjob.
But those are outside things, aren’t they? Atmospheric disturbances. How is Planet Jared doing, I believe the question was. Nevermind the asteroids.
Pretty good.
One thing the Ankle Incident drove home is how my tendency to rush to the end keeps me back. Dealing with the broken bones, and then the subsequent healing (still ongoing!) forced me to slow down and contemplate what I was doing. I tend to get very Zen in moments of crisis, judging what behavior is most effective from an almost detached perspective–you can ask the paramedics; I had ‘em laughing all the way to the hospital–and this injury kept me in that state for longer than usual. And what I’ve come away with, is it’s better to do things than to do plan what you’re going to do with them.
Don’t count your chickens, in other words. But in a creative way. Don’t name you chickens, maybe? Don’t make your posters for your dancing chicken show, until they’ve hatched and it’s clear that dancing is their true calling? You get the idea.
This is been hard for me, because it’s my nature to skip to the end. But that’s alot of pressure to put on oneself, and it’s easy to put the work aside if it becomes clear that it’s not going to end up where you wanted it to in your head. I’ve done that too much. It’s hard to stop that, to scale back into the smaller frame. But it’s the right thing to do. ‘Cuase if a project works, then I can build on it. And if it doesn’t, well, it was just a small idea to begin with.
That’s an email I sent in July, which means I learned the Lesson of 2009 early. 2009 has been my nonline year, full of projects and events that weren’t designed for virtual spaces. It was a year of food and sculpture, of theater and photography, and of secrets. Especially secrets. A great many things happened in 2009, but most of them never reached this space. Nonline year.
Just as 2008 will always be defined by my wedding, 2009 will always be the year I broke my ankle. It will be the year JR was able to sleep in the hospital bed with me because nurse saw her as my wife. It will be the year I re-learned how to walk, the year I struggled with what the truly handicapped go through every day, the year everything slowed down to crawl. The year I learned what it takes to break bones and what it takes to rebuild muscles.
A year of learning, as the Lesson of 2009 above can attest.
y favorite expression concerning the New Year has always been “That much still a child, I still consider the start of the year to be at the fall.” Back to school, and all. If 2009 has any distinction, it’s that the end of summer didn’t feel like the end of the year at all. And that this casual, academic shuffling from one winter day to another felt like the end of something old and the start of something new. We’re starting over, the lot of us. Setting it all back to zero for one more go.
Though the years barely more than a week old, there’s been more than enough sadness to go around. Two recent deaths have hit pretty hard, and that’s just the tip of the melancholy iceberg that extends far out into our friends and loved ones. It been hard to look at the new year with hopeful faces.
But.
On January 1st, I was told by a friend I had known for a handful of months that it was like we had known each other all out lives. Last night, I had a dinner of Iron Chef quality with a friend I had not seen in ages, and met a friend I hope to know for ages yet. This morning, I juggled snowballs, something that had never, strangely, occurred to me before.
Let this be 2010, then. A year of the old ways made new, and the new ways made old.
Also, let it be full of Jessica Hische’s delightful letters from Daily Drop Cap.
