New Year in the North

I was hiking Akchour, winding around the mountain, looking ahead at my friend Wade when I realized that it was 2016. New Years’ had come and gone and the thought of resolutions hadn’t even occurred to me.

In recent years few things have occupied more of my time and thoughts. I took a writing class once where the teacher asked us two questions for every story we read: first, what’s happening? And second, what’s really happening? The past few New Years have found me in bed with a mug of coffee and my journal trying to answer those two questions. What happened and what did it mean? 

But this year, I was in a place so physically beautiful I had forgotten to mull. I had forgotten to be resolute! 

We hadn’t looked at a map. We had prepared in no way for what lay ahead and so the hike felt endless. But each turn brought something new. Weave this way and you were in Morocco, that way and it was Japan, here Virginia, there Costa Rica. We looked up to our right and saw monkeys. And down to our left, finally, we saw it: Le Pont de Dieu. The Bridge of God. A stunning natural bridge made from water passing under it. 

So much has happened this year. So much (literal) water under the (literal) bridge. I think of the past year in three parts. The first third, I felt very alone, very aware of it. The second third, I was very social. Nashville in the summertime. The summertime in general. The last third was leaving all I knew, coming to Morocco. 

Last January, when I was working at Trader Joe’s, a woman came through my checkout line who oozed warmth and affirmation. Every now and then I’d get someone who came through my line like her, someone who reminded me what I wanted to be like. We fell into an easy conversation, about Januarys, resolutions, the types of ads you’re pummeled with this time of year. She said something so simple but that pierced me. “Things don’t happen like that,” she said. “Change is incremental.” 

I repeated it to myself in the coming days and months, when it felt like nothing was changing, when it felt like there was no curve in the tracks up ahead for me. Like the little engine that could, I thought of the woman with the warm, shining face. Change is incremental. In the long expanse before spring truly comes, you have to remind yourself again and again. It doesn’t look like things are happening. But they are. Change is coming. It is. 

The early twenties can feel so blind. Every turn feels like it’s the end of the world. You don’t have the rhythm down yet. You want life to happen all-at-once, with a very clear cause and effect. But things don’t happen that way. Instead, you keep going. You refuse to give up. Like the slow relentless course of water, you refuse to look for an easier way around. You follow Mary Oliver's "Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."