The weeks of Christmas and New Year’s used to be time of rumination for me. A time to look back at the past year, and ahead to the next. I probably look very quiet and maybe even withdrawn for those couple of weeks every year, but inside, my mind is spinning madly, taking all the puzzle pieces of the past year and trying to make sense of them. What events changed me? How? What was my part in those changes? What did I do well? What have I done less well? What things from my past affected my decisions? Where was that positive and where did that past hinder me from moving forward. Where the heck is forward anyway?

The weeks of Christmas and New Year’s used to be time of rumination for me. A time to look back at the past year, and ahead to the next. I probably look very quiet and maybe even withdrawn for those couple of weeks every year, but inside, my mind is spinning madly, taking all the puzzle pieces of the past year and trying to make sense of them. What events changed me? How? What was my part in those changes? What did I do well? What have I done less well? What things from my past affected my decisions? Where was that positive and where did that past hinder me from moving forward. Where the heck is forward anyway?

It has always been easy to take that time because in my work, the last couple of weeks of the year are very slow. Most of my clients, unless there is an emergency, don’t want to see me. Most of my vendors are closed for the last couple of weeks. So it is a natural time to do this.

I haven’t done much of that kind of thinking the past decade or so however. Ever since my divorce, I’ve kind of lived in a moment to moment place. Planning ahead didn’t make sense to me, or maybe I just was not capable. When you see 25 years of relationship evaporate, along with all the hopes and plans that quarter century represents, something in you questions the value in making plans.

At first, I was simply in survival mode. My emotions were like the emotions of anyone who experienced deep, deep lost. A loss not just of relationship, but of identity, of direction, of purpose, of…. of so much of who and what I was, or who and what I thought I was.

I healed. Most of us do. But that habit of living in a short term place became just that, a habit. It had worked for me in the trying to survive time, and I fell into it as a safe way to live. I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back, I can see that. I stopped making plans. I did my work. I kept my commitments. I met my deadlines.

Some of it might have been driven by depression, which I have fought for a lot of years. Depression often keeps us from being all we can be. It darkens the sun in our lives. Depression makes it harder to see life in terms of possibilities. Many people think depression keeps you from functioning, and for a few that is true. But for most of us who battle it, we function just fine, but without the drive or joy or sense of possibility that the other 93% of the world gets to experience. It is harder for us to push forward. And so, many of us don’t. We live day to day. Looking too far forward was just too hard.

There’s nothing wrong with day to day, but for me, it was not my natural state. I lived most of my life living in a place of perpetual possibility. I was always making plans. Making things happen. Joyfully diving into things that left me over my head and yet, somehow, pulling it off anyway.

But not for the last decade. I’ve had moments of happiness, but not a lot of deep joy. I’ve had moments of work that I was very proud of, but no direction, no purpose to it beyond paying the bills. I went to church, but didn’t do much except go and worship and heal. I created – poems, essays, art, photography, but with no purpose in mind. Nothing connected. Everything was a moment in time.

The past couple of years have been hard. I lost both of my parents within a year’s time. We sold my parent’s home and broke up all the things that had been a stable part of life since I was ten. I ended a long term relationship. I lost a job. I had about a year where everything that could go wrong, did. Looking back, it was an amazing string of bad fortune.

A lot of my friends worried that my depression, always looming in the background, would rise it’s ugly head and start to win the battle.

For some reason that has not happened. Just the opposite. Don’t ask me to explain why. I have no idea.

Maybe it was my kids. My daughter moved up here to spend her senior year with me, then went to college. She came to me broken emotionally, and in the six years since I have seen her grow back into herself, and grow back into the person I knew she was on track to be. A leader. Compassionate. Smart. She graduated from college. She has dreams again. She is moving towards them. My son moved up here last summer, also broken, though in different ways. In the mere six months since he’s been here, I have seen him blossom. Parts of him I thought might be lost forever are coming back. There is joy in him.

My role for both of them was simply to be a safe place. They’ve taken that safe place and took the steps and did the work to become their best selves. And that courage they showed, and the fact that they have, I believe, wonderful lives being their true selves ahead of them, that began to have me thinking beyond today.

Maybe too, part of my change has come from my parents’ deaths. I have spent a lot of time looking over their lives. How they lived them. How how they lived them affected me and my sisters and still does today. It also pointed something out to me. Neither of them retired until they were in their mid seventies. In fact, hardly anyone in my family ever retired until they were quite old. Way older than I, at 60, am.

I can remember my grandfather. My dad’s dad. After years of having back pain, it got so bad that at age 70 or so, he got back surgery. I remember him telling me afterwards that he never bothered because he figured he was near the end of his life and it didn’t matter. But getting rid of the pain gave him a new lease on life. He bought a new car. A new truck. He began to plan ahead again. And lived till his mid eighties.

And suddenly, this year, all that sunk in. Assuming I take decent care of myself, and someone doesn’t take me out on the NJ turnpike, I’m likely to have a fair number of years, good years, active years, left. Maybe a plan or two would not be a bad idea. Maybe there’s time to accomplish some of the things I’d still like to accomplish.

Maybe too is was because I have a relationship now that lives in possibility. Where it’s safe to say “This excites me” or “This scares me”, or “I am good at this.” or I suck at this.”. It is the most emotionally safe place I have lived in for many, many, many years.

I have been told that I am a “safe” person to talk to. That for the most part, I am gentle and easy to talk to. That people don’t worry much when they are around me about what I think of them. The people I love seem to know that perfection is SO not needed to keep that love. If that is true, it comes from a place of knowing, in painful detail, my own shortcomings.

I don’t think I realized the value of that safe place. It was just something I do. But now, having it in my own life, I understand its value. I understand that it frees you to take chances. It gives you a positive energy. It lifts you up. It gives you permission to fail as long as you keep making the effort.

And suddenly, you feel you can plan again. Or at least I do. I have begun to think in longer terms. In terms of possibilities, of futures. I feel more comfortable making commitments.

It’s funny. I have been talking and writing about how important a sense of safety is for many many years. In Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”, a book I used to reclaim my own creative identity several years ago, safety is her first step towards a creative recovery. I think it’s the thing that allows us to flourish. A safe place.

But while I’ve tried hard to create that safe place for others, I think I had forgotten how much I needed it myself. Funny how blind we can be. If I did understand it, I likely would have done things to create that safe place a long time ago. As it turned out, it just happened, God at work perhaps. But it happened. Slowly over the past year or two. In what should have been the worst of times.

So what’s the lesson? Safety first perhaps? I think so. Yes, I do. Rediscovering safety, emotional safety, has changed me. It has healed me. Not completely. I still have a long ways to go. But It has me looking, for the first time in over a decade…. ahead.

Be well. Travel Wisely,

Tom