And that is perfectly okay.
I made no specific plans for 2023, no resolutions, only a vague idea along the lines of "nesting". I didn't want to go anywhere do anything, just settle. It seems that the time since I moved into this house, in late 2019 had been a time of turmoil. There was Covid, a fall, struggles with atrial flutter that twice ended up sending me into heart failure, breast cancer, six surgical procedures, chemotherapy, and radiation. I'm still here but the process itself has been life altering.
I'd moved into my new house, but I hadn't settled. There has been a lot of fluffing, rearranging, working myself back into systems; there is still a lot I am really not keeping up with, although it is questionable whether I care enough to worry about any of that. With all this puttering about, I have also come to a profound realization that there are a lot of aspects of who I was and what I chose to do which were no longer relative to who I am today and who I want to be. Some of those realizations started off innocently enough, with baby steps, that led into sudden and unexpected metaphorical falls, or new realizations.
As a result, what started out simply enough as a project involving a physical place called home, has ended up having profound repercussions on the spiritual place called self. Doors have been opened. Doors have been closed. And I find myself in a new place that is simultaneously an old place, a place I have always been, although not always fully in touch with.
I am, oddly, content. That word, oddly, is relevant here, because I have come to the realization that contentment is not truly familiar territory. I have sought peace, sought contentment, or joy, or happiness, But somehow I always thought of it as something to achieve, somehow missing the point. Contentment just is. You cannot get there by trying. But I was reared in a society and a world where planning and goals, and who one wants to be in life were paramount, and I have always been a planner, an organizer, an achiever, a doer of things. I was brought up to believe that self alone was never enough.
Until, suddenly, it was. I cracked a door, and something unexpected came flooding in. I am content. I have no real plans. I have no real expectations. I don't know where I am going and I find that a perfectly satisfactory place to be.
In fact it seems that all the times in my life when I had plans and expectations, goals, drives, schedules, all of these ideas of who I was, what I should do, who I should be were based on some idea outside myself that I had to live up to, that they were simultaneously a necessary adaptation to reality and a fools errand, a story I told myself in order to live, based on a version of artificial reality, perhaps. There is the reality of the world. Of culture, of society, of human community, which we create, and which is necessary for our very existence, and yet the very nature of the realities we create for ourselves is simultaneously arbitrary and completely necessary.
I'm not saying I care not for the world. I'm not saying anything really, except that I am here at a place in my life where I see that much of what I have pursued prior to this point does not have meaning to the person I am now, in this moment. That does not mean my previous life, goals, experiences, were a waste of time or meaningless, everything has led to where I find myself in this moment, on the threshold of something new, new to me. I have no idea where I am going, or who I will be tomorrow, other than perhaps myself. But I don't know who that self may be.
Early in the year, I became fascinated with the Beowulf story. I picked up the three or four different direct translations I have, and a couple of retellings of those interpretations, perhaps a story loosely based on the original but reshaped for the culture in which it was written. My intent was to pursue this idea of the hero's journey and how this journey shaped an understanding of civilazation that still shapes us today. And it does, still. In beowulf we can see the roots of Christianity, of the Hebrew Bible which lies at the basis of three of the world's great religions, and whose beliefs and conflicts still shape the world today.
But I also saw something else. Beowulf had to come home. The ultimate goal of the hero's journey is to take that journey back to where it started, to go home, and to learn how to live, not as the hero, but simply as himself as a human being. Perhaps the goal of life is to go out on our grand journey, whatever that may be, and I believe all journeys and all goals are grand, but in the end we have to come back to ourselves, if we are lucky, to settle back into life, the life we were born to live, as our essential selves, to be who we are simply in the present, and that person is very close to the person we were born to be. The ultimate goal then is a very small and personal life. The hero's journey is the world. The secret to eternal life exists in the tiny nugget of the soul, of being the self in the everyday passing of life.
Oh, I gave up before I finished my studies. I may have made all this up. I don't know. Perhaps I will get back to it. Perhaps not. I am at a stage in my life when fretting about the future seems meaningless.
What I do know, is that for all I have written and thought about expectation and control, and the letting go of same, the path from thinking to actually doing, or not doing as would be the case here, has proven to be fraught. And now it is not. I suddenly find, that having softened my grip on my own expectations, many things that were holding to tightly have fallen away, and many new vistas have opened.
All I know is that today matters. And what I do today patterns, not for the world, but for my own soul, and in the end, that is all I can control. I have no idea what my choices mean. I'm not even sure that meaning, or intention, or plans are the things I should be pursuing. I have no idea what next week brings. I only know where I stand right now and that all I can do is what is important to me, right now, in this moment. The future? Well I've never had any control over that no matter how much my human psyche is filled with plans.
It is time for another cup of coffee and to see what today brings.
