Time: Measuring the Year in a Life (12/18)

December 18th

Time: Did time move quickly or slow for you this year? Was there ever a moment where you felt you blinked and the year was half over? When was that? What were the circumstances? Do you believe there’s some truth in thinking in currency of time as opposed to money? 

I love the Eva Cassidy version of the song "Time After Time." It's incredibly slow, tender, and heartbreaking. 

Time moved both incredibly slowly and quickly at the same time. As I noted in my other blog, I had come to think of the year as bookends. Even as I reread this and know that I still faltered, I cried, and I struggled within the year- everything that happened did so in bookends. 

The post originally written in July is reposted here:

“525,600 minutes how you measure the year in a life?” begs and so tries to answer the theme song of the musical Rent. 
When I think about the “year in a life” right now, I think of the word bookends. It’s the marking of both the beginning and the end of something, and the story that’s told between those markers is how you measure that year in a life. 

Bookends are like the sunrise and sunset of the day. 

At the sunset of one year and the dawn into another I made myself a promise. 

“In 2011, I’m going to like myself more,” I said. I wrote it down. I published it on this blog so that anyone could see and hold me accountable should I have any doubt that I could do it. 

A post called “Floating on the Wings of Earthly Angels” [written 12/19/2010] told the story of how very real people turned up in my life in previously unimaginable ways. Emotionally, spiritually, and some days, physically, I was floating on angels. Now, I am again, and this time no one had to say anything. I already knew. 

Anyway, days grew into weeks and weeks grew into months and somehow I found myself standing seven months after that post without a single question or doubt that everything had in fact happened for a reason. 

Tomorrow will mark one year since something quite specific in my life. It will also be what would have been my Grandma’s ninety-second birthday. When I look at where I will be tomorrow and where I was exactly 365 days earlier and then all that has happened in between, I can’t imagine it only being 525,600 minutes. 

I started July 22, 2010 in tears of emotional hope. 

I ended July 21, 2011 with a smile that could not be wiped from my face that could only be described as ethereal joy. No hope necessary, it just is.  

The story that’s told in the middle of these bookends is a year in a life. 

It’s told simply: in small and big prayers, in some very big cups of coffee, quite a few bottles of wine, moments of uncontrollable laughter, the making of some wonderful new friends (some old one’s too) and memories, as well as the shedding of a former self that all built up to an overflowing of gratitude. 

Bookends. 
        Oh, and I totally like myself more.