New Year's Resolution

      It's safe to say that I'm a very nostalgic person with a great memory, which means that I tend to spend a lot of time living in the past.  I don't really believe in forgetting experiences, whether they be wonderful or painful.  Forgetting a wonderful memory is a shame and discarding a painful one is a waste.  Memories echo like faint harmonics to the everyday events of my life.  I look out my classroom window at the snow falling outside in the parking lot, and I also see the debate round I was panicking in, only to look out the window to see snow secretly falling while we were stressing ourselves out about with a bunch of words.  I see snow falling as I quickly walk out of the opera talking and laughing.  I watch it piling up on birdfeeders at home on a rare snow day in April.  I stare out my bedroom window back at home late at night, just watching the flakes fall in the dimness.  The longer I watch the snow out my classroom window, the more snowfalls I see.  I love this way of living.  It gives life depth and color and makes me feel as if I am constantly connected to everyplace I've ever been and everyone I've met.  

   

      But this pattern of thought also means that I can spend too much time looking backward instead of forward.  We all have times in our lives that stand out like bright sunlit patches among the other memories.  There the colors are vivid and living, feelings run deeper, and it seems as if we are living more fully than at other times.  It's the natural course of things for these bits of stormy radiance to come and go, live in memory, fade into the background with the rest of the echoes, and then be outshone one day by a fresh experience.  Twice now, I have made myself unhappy because I stared so long at a shining memory that it because like a spot light, leaving me blind and throwing the present into comparative darkness.  As the light begins to fade, I mourn its passing and reproach the world for being so dark and dingy.  Once before, and now again, I am going to make a choice rare for me: close my eyes, turn away from frantically holding a fading past, and step into the rich and fertile darkness of the future.  

   

Emily Dickenson wrote:

   

My life closed twice before its close;
  It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
  A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
  As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
  And all we need of hell.

   

Parting with the parts of our lives when we were fully living can feel like accepting a form of living death, but accepting those deaths is the only way to continue to live.  Who knows what lights have shone out of the darkness ahead that I missed because I insisted on walking backwards, eyes fixed on a retreating light?  Our past, no matter how bright, will fade, and if we continue to measure what it means to be alive by a those spot-light past moments, we will do nothing but mourn a darkness that is only a trick of that same light and eventually fade with the memories we refuse to release.

      

And, finally, from Tennyson:

   

CVI. 
 
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, 
  The flying cloud, the frosty light: 
  The year is dying in the night; 
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. 
 
Ring out the old, ring in the new, 
  Ring, happy bells, across the snow: 
  The year is going, let him go; 
Ring out the false, ring in the true. 
  
Ring out the grief that saps the mind, 
  For those that here we see no more; 
  Ring out the feud of rich and poor, 
Ring in redress to all mankind. 
  
Ring out a slowly dying cause, 
  And ancient forms of party strife; 
  Ring in the nobler modes of life, 
With sweeter manners, purer laws. 
  
Ring out the want, the care, the sin, 
  The faithless coldness of the times; 
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes, 
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
  
Ring out false pride in place and blood, 
  The civic slander and the spite; 
  Ring in the love of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good. 
  
Ring out old shapes of foul disease; 
  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; 
  Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
  
Ring in the valiant man and free, 
  The larger heart, the kindlier hand; 
  Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be.