Happy? New Year?

New years has been one of the more underwhelming moments of celebration in my calendar. Most other holidays carry with it a variety of different pleasant memories, but New Years is filled largely with dull recollections and early nights sleep.

I find most people have this experience. You see in movies stories of people waiting till midnight to kiss beautiful strangers and fall in love, but the vast majority of people are going to sleep and wondering what they are going to do on a day with no plans and no stores open.

There is one tradition, however, I chose to carry on and that is the notion of 'a year in review.' New years has a way of asking, "so what now?" Now that you've had that (2017), what now (2018)? As I reflected on 2017, all I could think of was stress and anxiety. I didn't feel joy or jubilation about any event, but rather an overwhelming sense of tension. It has made me realize that my attitude has been to perceive myself as only having a value of agency in my family rather than in intrinsic value/benefit for simply being myself to those I love. Said another way, I felt like I was okay as long as I could benefit someone when the people who love me see a benefit in me and not what I can do for them.

Relationships are funny. How often we project or agenda onto others and fit their response into our story of life. If people were happy with me, its cos I did something for them. If people were unhappy, its cos I failed them. Really?! Is the whole world so brutal? Are the people I love so without concern?! No. Of course not. Yet, what a lesson to learn. I learnt that lesson sitting in a movie theater with my brother and nephew watching star wars. As the tears streamed down my face I felt a sense of relief and release because I am actually doing okay. My wife likes me. My kids like me. My friends like me. I am doing okay. I am not at the top of the world, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is that I am here and I am in the game.

Its easy to look at the big stories and scale the value of our future by our past, but the simple and beautiful reality is that there is a future. There is a tomorrow because I am alive and I have the power to love and be loved. I can express myself and to live a deeply satisfying life where I can serve out of love rather than obligation and care and receive care out of a sense of value. So, dear reader, as you reflect on your 2017 and think of your 2018-realize that there are endless possibilities within 2018 that offer rewards both menial and transcendent to effect you, but the truest reward will come in those you choose to love and cherish. In closing, find someone to kiss or hug or smile at or high five. Risk in relationships. Risk loving and letting yourself be loved. Its easy to live in a world of exchange, where we see relationships as a market transaction, but take courage and go beyond and find your value in truly honest and sincere love. Happy new year reader. I hope your 2017 blew your mind and that you go into 2018 with hope for a future better than you can imagine. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go kiss my wife and kids.

A beginning, a middle and an end

Whenever my friends declares that they have hit some sort of midlife crisis due to a birthday and the realization of getting older, my response is the same, "did you expect something else to happen."

As a person who lost a intimate relationship very young I had a very early introduction to endings and they have followed me ever since. There is always a little kernel in me that pauses to give consideration to the endings. There was a really beautiful letter that Abraham Lincoln sent to the daughter of a dear friend who died.

"Dear Fanny

It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln"

It is an eloquent soul that can so be attuned to the how we understand and lament endings. 

Yet, this is a blog about a young family and it concerns beginnings. My children are very young. My son is 6, his brother is 3 and his sister is 1. Yet even now I am struck that they have changed. They understand the world a little bit better and are a little bit more capable of a little more than before. They are climbing mountains, so why am I at the bottom of their mountains wishing they were with me. When I look at pictures of them from a year or two ago, I am struck that the kid that sits before me isn't the same kid. From what I understand most parents lament this transition a little. So why are we as people so bad at living life. 

In a world where we are fed notions of progress not peace. We believe in getting rather than God. We consider usability before unity. We believe virtue positions itself in the future. We ache for a world we dont have and when we get it our world view steals are joy of the moment and we go on to wish for the world we had to come back. In short, we want what we had and what we might have in the future. In light of all this, I am inclined to ask myself the question, "did you expect something else to happen."

My lessons for this current stage of life is to treat emotions as markers on a path. Its not wrong for me to miss my kids infancy, but if I follow that emotion it will lead me to a place I dont want to go. It will steal my joy and steal me from my kids and wife who are the most important. So as I reflect on the beginning, the middle and the end I am reminded of Ecclesiastes

"You who are young, be happy while you are young,
    and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart
    and whatever your eyes see,
but know that for all these things
    God will bring you into judgment.
10 So then, banish anxiety from your heart
    and cast off the troubles of your body"

Welcome to this day my dear reader. Welcome to this moment. Banish anxiety in the knowledge that it is God's desire for you and embrace the beauty of the million moments you have been given.