2020: Goodbye, Adios, Farewell--We Won't Soon Forget You

 "Hope...Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

2020.

Don’t let the door hit you in the fanny on the way out.  All’s well that ends well…or that ends not so well.  Should auld acquaintance be forgot? I’ve no idea what “auld” means but should 2020 be forgot? Yup. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Awful old year. The best is yet to come for the worst is almost done. (Made that one up myself!) New Year’s Eve! Old Year Leave!

I’m trying to come with up with as many New Year’s cliches as I can, then adapt them for this eve of 2020, when this year, this YEAR, finally, thankfully, comes to a close on the 31^st at just after 11:59:59 pm. Can’t come soon enough.

On a “normal” New Year’s Eve, I’d be in Florida with my beloved relatives: eating way too much of my Aunt Donna’s good cooking and getting a big steak out at a restaurant and going to the movies three or four times and treating my two cousins to brand new books at Barnes & Noble and reveling in the Christmas lights as they glow, dance, and blink, all strung from the palm trees.

But thanks to COVID there’s no chance I’ll get on a plane and I may just stay home. If I do decide to drive north and be with my “pod” friends, it will be in a very chilly place, as far from “highs in the seventies and sunny” as you can get. The love I’ll experience with them will absolutely be warm but it will be wicked cold outside. First time in 17 years I’m not heading south.

Thanks, COVID.          

There are so, so many other things from 2020 I just want to leave behind. Lockdowns. No attending a live baseball game in summer, for the first time in my adult life.  Zoom meetings and watching in shock and awe as family and friends and co-workers freeze up on the screen, like latter day Max Headrooms. When this is all finally over I won’t miss spending the majority of my time at my home office dining room table. Never thought I’d say it but I miss my real office. I will be so excited for the day when hugs are allowed again.  Can’t wait to stand in the receiving line at church after worship and shake as many hands as I want. Remember handshaking? I won’t miss being shocked at how many pages the obituaries take up in the Sunday newspaper, or hearing from friends that their parent or grandparent was taken by the virus. Won’t miss the worry I have for my eighty-something year old Mom and my immuno-compromised sister. God, please keep them safe.

But if I’m really, really honest with myself, there are actually things I want to hang onto from 2020. Lessons I want to keep, that have made me spiritually grow, because I walked through such an intense year and am almost at the end. My faith teaches me that redemption can be found even in the worst of times, that everything can be redeemed, found to have some good, some blessing.

So, post 2020, I want to never, ever want to take for granted the folks who love me in this life and the folks I love so much. My renewed connections this year with family and friends, though mostly virtual, have been a revelation. Who’d have thought a pandemic would deepen our human bonds?

My oldest and best friends in the world? We’ve met every single Thursday night since early spring and that weekly Zoom session has been a lifeline for me. Corny jokes and remembering when and burdens shared. What a gift. My brother somehow found a way in early November to throw me a COVID safe surprise birthday party. Thanks Ed. Best birthday ever! In the church I serve I’ve led a group of seniors in Zoom Bible study, almost every single Wednesday morning since March. God always shows up too. My choir friends and I mourn this life without in person singing, but still we faithfully gather virtually and have even recorded some songs. Amazing. And there’s my friend Jill. Since COVID broke out we’ve walked the many cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood on so many afternoons. With each step we listen and we complain and we laugh and we check in and we remember what it is to just be human and to support one other person in the walk called life. 

Goodbye 2020.  I will never, ever forget you. None of us will. You’ve broken our collective hearts but out of that heartache, we’ve actually been able to find some good too.

Farewell. Adieu. Adios. Aloha. See ya later alligator. Not.

That’s all folks. Thank God.

 

 

      

       

 

Washing the Dishes: How the Ordinary In Life Will Save Us

“In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.”   

--Mike Lancaster, American author

The extraordinary. The ordinary.

Wash the pots and pans and pile them up on the counter to dry. Bake rye bread. Boy, does that taste so good, toasted and with peanut butter! Write my weekly newspaper column. What will this week’s topic be? Sing and record the bass parts for my virtual choir. Snow blow the end of the driveway so the ice doesn’t build up. Take a walk on a chilly afternoon and listen to the crunch of snow underfoot. Write a letter to my friend Eric in Minnesota. I loved the birthday note he sent to me. And don’t forget to make a dentist appointment.

Pretty ordinary things to do on a pretty ordinary Monday in the ordinary month of  December. Thank you God, just today, for the ordinary.

Ordinary tasks calling out to me, the mundane and seemingly ho-hum activities that make up my life and that take up all human lives. Grocery shopping and fixing dinner and helping with homework. Little things we accomplish, the to-do list with activities that are not earth shattering or unprecedented, that don’t have much at stake and are absolutely not extraordinary.

The ordinary: it makes up most of the time we are allotted on this earth. That’s a truth I need to hang onto for dear life and sanity in these extraordinary days.

For along with COVID fatigue, I am also struggling with an affliction I call “extraordinary fatigue.” Being bombarded on a daily basis with the extraordinary, the unprecedented, the intense. Life in a year unlike any other year I’ve ever experienced. I’m getting sick of it. Feeling that life’s volume is turned up to eleven and I can never turn it down, or mute the incessant chatter of doom and gloom, or just turn off the ferocity of living. I’m wrung out by it all, emotionally exhausted and I’m ready to move on to the normal, the predictable, the boring even!

But the extraordinary: we all face it. Days and nights of lockdowns and fear of lockdowns and cancelled holidays and remote schooling and economic angst and becoming a “zoombie” with all those hours staring at a screen. But wait—there’s more! An election that’s over but apparently it’s not over for tens of millions of my fellow citizens. Hope for a vaccine as soon as possible but ominous warnings too about the dark days of winter yet to come. Wondering when I will once again be free to actually be with people, closer than six feet and for longer than one hour and without a blasted mask covering my face!

So, my prayer this day is pretty simple: God, wake me up to the ordinary details of life that I need to do, to think about, to plan for, to tackle, and most important to be thankful for.

I have a feeling that the ordinary is what will get me, get all of us, through to the other side of these extraordinary days. The ordinary is what will keep our paths straight and our thoughts sane and our hearts full and our souls serene. The ordinary. The woodworking projects I have planned out for the months ahead: building blanket chests for my three nieces. The recipes I will experiment with in my slow cooker and the loaves of bread I will bake and then share with my friends as a way to say, “I love you.”       

One of my favorite religious icons is a drawing of Saint Therese of Lisieux, standing at a sink and doing the dishes, as the steam rises up, like incense, like a prayer, to heaven. As her fellow saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, noted, “God walks among the pots and pans.”  God walks among the ordinary things of life. In a saints’ past and in the right now too. 

God help us all to embrace the ordinary, as we continue to walk through these extraordinary times. For the divine is right here, right with us, right now. The holy. The eternal.  That which saves us. May we all remember this small miracle the next time we wash the pots and pans.

The ordinary? It is extraordinary.

 

 

       

   

   

 

 

 

 

For Real Happiness? Let Go of Expectations. Let Life Unfold.

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”                        --Michael J. Fox, actor and activist, with Parkinson’s disease

A sixteen pound turkey, hot out of the oven.  A house filled with overnight holiday guests, friends and family gathered for a multi-day celebration.  Watching my favorite Thanksgiving movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, with my Godson, and laughing at the same goofy jokes every year. Twelve sets of hands connected around the table, each of us saying what we were most thankful for on that fourth Thursday of November.

That is not what happened last week at my home, not even close.

Instead almost every single cherished holiday tradition I was so ready to mark and carry out in 2020—none occurred. All the typical hopes I usually have for my favorite holiday of the year? None came true, not even one. The rituals I was so used to: these could not be practiced either, not in these strange days. 

Instead, I cooked a big steak on the grill, and baked a potato and steamed some asparagus, for my Turkey day meal, and then watched solo, a favorite movie. I hung out with loved ones, not in person, but over Zoom. I made my first ever pumpkin pie, with a crust from scratch, because there was no one else to bake. I spent two hours with friends in my COVID pod, in person, for pie and football, but not for too long, to keep it safe. I spoke by phone with all of the folks I’d have usually given a big hug too.

And it was still a great Thanksgiving, one I will never, ever forget, that’s for sure.

But in order for me to experience that day in a brand new way, to be open to the surprises and gifts that life sent my way, I had to let go of something I often hang on to so tightly, for dear life even. My expectations: what I believed that day should have been like. My expectations of how everything was supposed to unfold. My stubborn insistence that this day had to be just like all of my other Thanksgivings in years past.

Here’s the miracle.

When I let go, life unfolded before me in ways I could never have predicted and for that, I am truly thankful. When I decided to jettison expectations, my heart opened and my mind opened. I was ready to experience this sometimes weird and unpredictable life in wholly new ways. That was my best holiday gift so in 2020, by far. Good spiritual practice, too, for year-end holy days and holidays, less than a month away. Good spiritual outlook to embrace for the rest of life too. 

To expect less. To temper expectations. To accept life more. To be ready and even excited about just what might happen, but only if we are willing to give up our need to control circumstances that are finally beyond our control.  Like a pandemic.

The first time I was introduced to this discipline of letting go was through one of the best loved prayers in the world, “The Serenity Prayer”, written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and first publicly prayed in 1943, at a church in the small town of Heath, Massachusetts.  It’s since been adopted by millions of people, especially folks in recovery from addiction, but its philosophy holds true for all of life.

He wrote, “God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s the line many of us already know by heart, wise advice, absolutely. But it’s a line in the original long version of the prayer that really challenges me to examine everything I expect in life, even demand, sometimes. 

“Living one day at a time. Enjoying one moment at a time….Taking this…world as it is, and not as I would have it, that I may be reasonably happy in this life….”

Reasonably happy!

When I approach life, with all of its unpredictability and all of its pain and all of its joy, with that one hope—reasonable happiness--life rarely disappoints me. For every day, even in the struggles, as with COVID, we can always find something beautiful, some grace, some blessing, some relationship, to be grateful for.  And some expectation to let go of.

So, this December, in 2020 and beyond…may God, may whatever higher power holds the universe together: may this spirit grant us wisdom, grant us acceptance and grant us courage, for the living of these remarkable days.

 

 

    

  

         

 

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