I cracked open the brown paper sack, a shaking and whacking sort of maneuver. I eyed how many books could fit inside of it and then crammed everything I could in. My once-crowded bookshelf looked tidier, less a place for storage and more a place to select a book or item of jewelry. My floor looked like someone had ransacked a used book store. One stack remained a high tower of question marks.
Dragging the overstuffed paper sack down the stairs, I thumped and thumped it along until the bottom. Where would I put my tower stack? I knew I couldn’t recycle the books I had worked on over so many years. I know I couldn’t donate them. But the time had come to move this tower stack, all books I had written or edited, out of my room and somewhere else in my life.
The tower stack found a spot in the basement bookshelves, high above the foosball table and indoor basket-ball hoops. Each volume a pocket of memories. I have a semi-photographic memory of every essay I’ve edited, every chapter I’ve combed through, every story I’ve coaxed out of a writer. I’m grateful for each word, phrase, and punctuation mark. I could admire those memories from a distance, but it was time to truly set them in the past.
2023 had been all about change. Change in work, change in health, change in prayer. And I hate change. I hated lots of these changes. I wrestled and wrastled with them. I cried at and fought them. And yet they happened at me until I allowed them to happen to me.
+ + +
My daughter leaned over the counter, planted her face on it, and let out a loud sigh. We both of us were weary of her writing lesson done from home, a modified school schedule to work with her medical challenges. I opened and closed the fridge: nothing looks good, nothing tastes good. “Let’s take a break and have a cup of tea. We’ll round back when you’ve rested.”
I had hoped our prognosis would be different. That January would have looked like normal school for her and normal toddler/work/home&hearth tending for me. The change I had hoped for wasn’t happening. At least not yet.
We sipped tea and reconnoitered during the toddler’s nap. I worked a little on my laptop while she read a book in front of the fire. I felt my weight sink into the couch, my fingers press into the hot mug’s body, my nose breathing loud at the end of this cold. It was 2024 and here we were.
+ + +
I looked at my friend’s softly wrinkled face, so out of context as she stood there in the airport terminal in her simple sari habit. She looked ready to rest on the other side of security, to sit quietly and pray in the airport, a brief break from her intensive work as our local superior. Just to sit and have no work to do, no poor to serve, no phone calls to make, no priests to schedule for Mass, she just would sit and be for a few moments before her next assignment across the country.
So I swallowed my tears as I saw her burgeoning joy at the prospect of the surprises Jesus had in store for her. How could I cry at her departure, painful as it was for me, in the face of her joy at being a missionary?
As I drove away from the terminal, away from her sweet handmade blue bag, away from our weekly chats and encouragements, away from her voice on the phone calling to see if I could help with this or that, I did cry. I cried for myself, really. That our lives would only intersect rarely now. That a deep change had happened.
+ + +
Maybe you’re a change-seeker akin to being a thrill-seeker. Maybe you’re as reluctant as I am for it. Maybe you’re change-neutral, a milky sort of it’sfineism. Dear reader, dear friend, I can only say that no matter what, changes comes for us all.
And when we resist, as I try and do, it comes AT us, like a freight train. (For a person who has never walked along rail-road tracks and seen a train, I can’t really use that metaphor to its completion, but nevertheless.)
So what if we allow it to happen to us, whether good or bad, neutral or meh? What if we allow it to wash over us, notice it, hold our heart’s hand and comfort its sadness at it, but allow it to permeate all of us.
I’m forever changed by my daughter’s illness. Even if and when, God willing, she’s 100% recovered. Nothing erases these years. I’m forever changed by nearly two years of deep and abiding friendship with a Missionary of Charity who taught me how to really serve the poor by recognizing I’m the poorest of them all. I hope to live in the lessons I’ve received.
So if change is inevitable and I can breathe through it like a Bradly Method contraction, what will that do? Probably open the pores of my heart up. Probably allow me to feel it more and sit in the feelings of it better. Probably free me from fear of change.
Here’s to 2024, a year already filled with surprises and I’m sure there’s more to come. Tell me what’s new for you already!
Prayers and hugs,
Nell
Nell, “ So what if we allow it to happen to us, whether good or bad, neutral or meh? What if we allow it to wash over us, notice it, hold our heart’s hand and comfort its sadness at it, but allow it to permeate all of us.” There has been a change in my life that has caused such a rift in my heart that I keep pushing it away. Denying the brokenness of it, trying to move forward without coming to grips with it.
After reading this part of your post, I stepped out from the bubble of denial. I sat with myself, let it come on in, acknowledging the changes I have been avoiding and just felt deflated. But, also for the first time in months I also felt more like my true self than I have in all those months.
Thanks Nell. Here’s to change.
Oh my goodness! Wrote this one down: "So if change is inevitable and I can breathe through it like a Bradly Method contraction, what will that do? Probably open the pores of my heart up. Probably allow me to feel it more and sit in the feelings of it better. Probably free me from fear of change." Free me from the fear of change... I want to be there. Another spot-on, beautifully written essay, Nell. Thank you.