Ah, 2024… what a disintegration you have been. The great undoing, the ultimate solvent.
In recent months I have watched two people close to me emerge from complete breakdowns that left them unable to work, perform expected-life-tasks, or function in any recognizable way. I have also been plunging through my own mid-life moment with a sudden cancer diagnosis I was fortunate enough to catch in its early stages.
Add all this to the global upheaval broadly known as earth-life-in-the-mid-2020’s, and you have what has shaped up to be an indescribable year. I feel bleached with learning and lived experience, and I am no longer the person I believed myself to be. To be so changed I no longer recognize myself has easily been my greatest life lesson to date.
Breakdowns are tough. They show us where we have refused ourselves, what we have denied. They take us right to the edge of it, and then another impossible step into what lies beyond. Whether we have been denying our bodies and minds necessary nourishment or rushing blindly ahead into life on toxic fumes, the break, when it comes, cannot be refused.
The change it leaves is as varied as the lives upended. No two turnarounds look alike, and yet there is so much commonality between us. As I look across this year come home to roost, I am left with an irreducible certainty: You may look back but there is no returning to it.
I have scraped at the residue of my past for as long as I have created one. If only I hadn’t this, or why didn’t I choose that? The returning to what never was has proven useless, and if breaking has shown me anything it is the value in efficiency.
One of the above mentioned friends just told me that the biggest takeaway from his collapse was realizing none of the boxes he’d been checking were his own.
…..The big international consultant career that eroded his health and left his mental state in shreds.
….The friendships he fed out of some constant pressure to be enjoying himself.
….The total energy vacuum that had become his life.
His words left me wondering if we have been living as our own, belonging to ourselves or to one another, at all? It is difficult to look around me today for an answer with any grasp of reality as I have previously defined it.
The disparity of wealth across the globe is enormous, and the drive to push these poles ever further apart seems unrelenting. We continue to sanction war and environmental destruction, and the self-proclaimed world superpowers have health and basic human rights crises they cannot seem to solve.
We scrabble for safety rather than offer it to one another, to ourselves.
These last days of 2024 and in the early, fresh breaths of 2025 I have one prayer, one asking that pops up on my phone as a daily calendar reminder. Please show me a life of gentleness. The slower, tender steps in my day are my most absorbing now, my most intentional. And after this year, they are the only movement that bears any weight.
If I am tempted to look ahead, I remind myself that this urge is equally fruitless. A repeat of trajectories unmet. Hope isn’t discovered tomorrow or in any perpetual past. It is immediate and, for me, in the arriving.
Wow, I just read your Jan. 2, 2025 entry.
Very powerful. It read with a wonderful flow and poignant, insightful thoughts.
Hope your health crisis is behind you.
Take care
Thank you for the well wishes and kind words, Henry!