Different

This year will be different. 

I suppose I end every year with the same sentiment, wanting the next three hundred and sixty-five (this year, 366) to be better, or, in some sense, happier.  Surely, I attempt to think I will be healthier, although the attrition of time is inevitable; I want to be wealthier, I think, or at least that's what I'm conditioned to believe that somehow wealth will make things easier for me; I want to be wiser - most assuredly, for in wisdom we find the most contentment in life.  That's why Solomon chose it.  Wisdom, and its genesis with the fear of God, is invariably where we find that life can be different.

But something else different has shifted in me, like the leading edge of a fault line and even though the earthquake (or lifequake in this instance) might not move the Richter scale, I feel like this forty-third trip around the sun will transform me.

Let me start again.

I watched a movie last night - About Time.  It was probably a mistake to watch it before I went to bed because the import of it confounded my dreams throughout the night and the waking moments of my today.  I won't spoil the entire movie, but it's essentially about a young man who is told, on his twenty-first birthday, by his father that he can travel backwards in time and with just a 'rumble, stumble and a flop around' he can go back to change little things in his life without upsetting the time/space continuum.

This is not a science fiction movie, but it is an incredible dialogue between living in the past and loving in the present.  So, the first question I asked myself was, "If I could travel back in the past to 'fix up' any of the more embarrassing or shameful things that happened, would I do so?"  The quickest response would have been 'yes, indeed.'  I would have loved to have avoided various points where I did not come out as the brightest spark from the fire.  The pain of embarrassment is one of the great motivating factors in life and to avoid them, well, let's just say that no (rational) human enjoys pain, whether physical or otherwise.

But the question I asked was the wrong one: It's not 'would I go back in time?' but 'how do I pay attention in the present?'  That's really the point of the movie and it is done in a masterful way; the desperate attempts to understand relationships and how love develops is where my mind should go, and I find myself essentially swimming in a shallow pool of guilt, because there are times when I believe that 'paying attention' has a price to it.  The more I reflected on the laps that I was making in this pool, the more I realized that 'paying attention' is really the only free thing that we do.  Everything else costs, whether time, energy or money - even love, which necessarily costs a beautiful sacrifice if done well. 

Paying attention is without cost and just because I notice one thing, that does not mean that my entire focus is absent from everything else.  For instance, I continue to recognize that my eldest daughter is now in her last year of high school and just lately, I've been seeing her in a different light, the bouncing curls of her hair which are so reminiscent of that small girl from fifteen years ago; the lilt of her voice and the ring of her laughter:  this does not distract my understanding of how my other two daughters, both of whom are loved equally as much, their own qualities of character; Josephine's steadfast sense of humor, the happy scrunching of her nose and how Greta's eyes light up at the thought of reading a book on the sofa all day long - I can think about those things all day long, how they used to be.  That's what photographs are for and sometimes we get lost in them because they are silenced happy echoes of what used to be.

Losing ourselves in photos is a necessary thing sometimes.  To remember is to be human, but it also allows us one more thing - to feel.  To feel and to sense is that which makes life completely livable. 

That's why this year will be different - all from watching a movie on a night when no one else was in the house.

Last night I spilled a glass of red wine all over our cream colored carpet.  First response?  A rush of blood to the brain and a resorting to muffled profanity while watching the wine drip down over my arms and down on my legs, like a hairy Plinko board, and soaking in to the carpet.  It looked like an artery had exploded in my arm.  I hurried to the kitchen to try to find anything that would soak it up; I had the forethought to leave the beautiful kitchen towels to grab rags and as I attempted to blot up the spilled wine, I paid attention to everything that was happening.

To be able to feel anger - it's blessing.  To be able to see the wine on the carpet - a blessing (mixed one at that).  To be able to hear the wind switching through the wooden slats - a blessing.  To feel the wine drying in red blotches between the moles on my arms - yes, a blessing.  You see, all these things, even though seemingly inconvenient, were an opportunity to remind me that to sense anything at all is what makes life livable. 

I would guess that most people don't pay attention, whether consciously or unconsciously, because they believe that what comes next is more important, and, more to the point, that the moment will come again.  But that's the tyranny of time, isn't it?  There might not be another opportunity, there might not be another day. 

I had a raspberry this morning and I tasted it's tartness like I'd never experienced it before and the walls of my soul were enlarged.  I smelled the freshness of the rain on the breeze - I closed my eyes and it reminded me of the early spring at my parents' house when the snow had been erased by the first warm day and the scents of the earth rose from a seemingly unlocked box.  I heard the BeeGee's this morning and although I find their sound variously fun and annoying at the same time, I reflected on why humans enjoy music.

This year will be different because I'm recognizing how fast it seems to be traveling.  If I could go back in time I would go back to that last Christmas my Grandpa Nacke was alive and I would hug him longer than I ever had before.  He always used to make a grunting sound as if I was squeezing him too hard but I always knew that was his way of saying "I love you."  In fact, I would go back to every important person in my life and embrace them for just a few brief moments longer than proper (probably) just to take in their feel and their touch, the sound of their breathing, the patterns of their voices and memorize them again.

But that's then, this year is different.  Perhaps this year I'll live life like I mean it.

Instead of spending days of my year on screens, which is the ultimate irony as I spend a good segment of the morning typing this in response to watching a movie, I'll power down and love up.  It sounds relatively cheesy, but love is the one thing we were truly made to do.  Instead of taking a nap, I'll take advantage of those who are in the immediate vicinity, because the time in which we cross paths may never come again. Our rivers might be divergent.  I'll play more board games with my kids; I'll hold my wife's hand at all possible opportunities; I'll Skype my parents and siblings; I'll give lots of gifts and enjoy the feeling of being wealthy beyond measure because I have made someone else happy.

I will refrain from swimming in my shallow pool of guilt because it does me no good - there is no benefit, no healthy exercise, in it.  I'll pay attention to things that have more value than guilt, which is everything else. 

In essence, I will be different.

Maybe you'd like to join me.  Pick up a pen and paper, enjoy the tactile contentment of the patience it takes to scribe words to someone you haven't spoken to in too long.  Eat something you've never tried before.  Go somewhere but don't take a picture of it.  Enjoy the present-ness of it.  Forget Facebook and selfies; refrain from Twitter and find other people to chat with without snapping.  Meet your neighbors and forgive your enemies.

Be different.