Tag Archives: beginnings

Waiting on Miracles

Greetings from the tail end of my annual whirlwind Christmas tour. As usual, it included the raucous, loving excess of Maloney Christmas in Chicago, the still quiet of Schuettler Christmas on a snowless plain in Wisconsin, and a small blended gathering back home in Duluth. I had designs of putting out a short Christmas story on this blog, but this time of year is always horrid for diligent writing effort, and while I’ll continue to plug along on the story, it’s far from ready.

This holiday is exhausting, and I enjoy the travel rush and have relatively few people to buy for. For whatever reason, organizing myself for the whole giving and receiving side of Christmas gets harder with time. As someone who leads a largely secular existence, I have some questions about what this holiday really offers for the non-churched aside from an excuse for rampant commercialism, over-the-top decorations, and a lot of corny nostalgia that I have less patience for every year. That leaves me with some great parties and family reunions, but I don’t think there’s any need to confine those to late December. Something, clearly, is missing.

So, to find some meaning behind what this all means for me, I’ll settle for a quote from the woman I’ve been quoting a lot lately, because somehow a Jew who never had kids can best encapsulate Christmas:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, “natural” ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether, discounting the keeping of faith as a very uncommon and not too important virtue and counting hope among the evils of illusion of Pandora’s box. It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”

–Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Merry Christmas.

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An Epigraph

If the series of stories I wrote on this blog were to be made into a novel, this quote would go at the start of it:

The life span of man running inevitably toward death would inevitably carry everything human to ruin and destruction were it not for the faculty of interrupting it and beginning something new, a faculty which is inherent in action like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The follow-up post I wrote to that fictional collection noted that the thrust of its contents were rarely if ever reactions to recent happenings in my life. They were the results of nearly a decade’s worth of thought and experience and experimentation that slowly marinated into the state in which they appeared on this blog. But the most recent evolution within that thought, however, centered somehow around the sentiment expressed in this quote.

The notion of beginning anew has undergirded this whole blog since it first got off the ground. It’s inherent in the idea of a cycle, and at times this blog has had posts that reference explicit new beginnings or resets in my life. As I age, I find a new appreciation for a fluid life; one that does not fit into easy boxes, and one that knows that people evolve in gradual ways, and that there is no such thing as a fixed way of being. While I’ve always thought this, I’ve come to embrace that sentiment as being somewhere near the very core of who I am. And more than ever, I’m finding successful ways to make sure I don’t fall into ruts of routine and give most every day the sense of immediacy it deserves.

At the end of 2017, I wrote a blog post on my frustrations with that particular year. I expressed impatience, and made a hockey metaphor: I was running a mindless cycle in a corner that looked good but wasn’t producing anything in the way of chances. That offensive zone cycle continued for much of 2018, and while I still might be waiting for the perfect shot a little too often, the cycle now has purpose. I’m setting up some good looks, and a barrage of shots may be just around the corner. My writing life played no small role in that process, and will pile up the assists when the goals start to come.

Even as 2018 comes to a close with all the usual trappings of holiday season tradition, I’m at a point of many beginnings. A new political cycle, some shifts in my workplace that could presage some big things, a new possible side venture, and a new hockey season: my activity level might finally near a place where I’m content with my efforts. Well, maybe. Here’s to those new beginnings, the cycle refreshed yet again.