In the late stages of Duluth East’s dismal 2024-2025 hockey season, I commiserated with a dad with whom I watched many games that year about the state of the program. The dad listed off a heap of players who were no longer with the program and sighed as he watched his own kid, one of the relative talents on a bad team, struggle to do what he could. “This is what we get for being loyal,” I lamented.

It was a strange, spontaneous comment whose bitterness has stuck with me since. Why was I so down? Loyalty is a value I hold deeply, both to people and to place. Such conviction comes at a price, and the tests of those things held most deeply reveal true character. People who know themselves, writes Joan Didion in “On Self-Respect,” “are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.” In that momentary lapse in a hockey arena, I forgot my respect for the odds, forgot that certain sacrifices are worth it if we truly believe what we say we do. I hope not to do so again.

Hockey was among the least consequential areas where I felt the price of loyalty this year. I fell deeper into a relationship than I have in years, and then I fell out of it, largely because my ex and I could not reconcile ourselves with the quasi-spiritual tie I feel to my hometown, where she does not live. I enjoyed my time with her, but I had to deal with the consequences of questioning one of my most deeply held articles of faith, and that faith won. At work, I dealt with the whims of powerful people beyond my circles of influence that have battered my employer; I got to be the executioner for a layoff. And yet, after fighting through the worst of that, I have found some of my past career ambivalence overrun by a deep commitment to the work I do and the places that I do it. I have come out of this year like a soldier who has been to war: bloodied, bruised, saddened by losses, and more committed to my core loyalties than ever.

As I worked through new life challenges, I realized what a hardened soul I can be. “You’re going to find that you are very set in your ways,” a friend who entered a long-term relationship with her now-husband in her late 30s warned me as I entered mine this year. She was spot-on. I am set not only in certain habits and what gets on my nerves, but also in how I manage conflict. I can dither, take too long to say important things, but when I make decisions, I do not second-guess them. I am not so bold as to claim I always make the right decisions, but I think I make the best decisions I can make for myself in the light of what I know, and that knowledge is enough. Again, from the Didion essay: “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.”

I am more confident than ever that I have that self-respect. I can discriminate with some confidence, even when I know it will hurt to do so. I know the tools I need to find a necessary level of inner calm. With that calm, I can accept that I have given everything I could, note any mistakes for future reference, and solider on. Explained poorly this thought process could feel heartless, but it is sustained by a flame burning beneath me, a restless fire of life that refuses to dwell, refuses to lapse into too dark a place because there is too much more to do. I know where to go when struggles arise: sometimes into the woods, sometimes into these words, perhaps into the arms of a few people who have been there through it all. But I go there and I make my commitments and that is that.

My confidence in these decisions gets some juice from the recognition that even a heavy year did not appear to age me much. In a weird way, I rediscovered some youth over recent months, gained insights into that flame beneath. “Don’t let the old man in,” repeated Uncle Bob on our summer hike in the Uncompahgre, a mantra for a man entering retirement who can still power up fourteeners. I am in a different stage of life, but I took those words to heart this year as I worked out more than ever, kept up my own travel pace, and found myself grumbling when other people preferred to sit and vegetate. Call it the Rob Jones effect (named for Uncle Bob’s son, my literally tireless cousin and semi-regular travel companion), call it some restless spirit, but it is core to who I am. I want to chase new experiences, say yes to things that make me a little uncomfortable, stay out until the end of the night if the situation demands it.

That value of youth was one of several things I learned or re-internalized over these tumultuous months. I can sometimes be a bit thermostatic, channeling the moods of people around me; that adaptability is a part of who I am. But beneath that there is a core, or at least a preferred set of modes I like to channel. The careful rationalizing of how my skillsets may complement another person’s, which works well in the work world, makes much less sense in a relationship. Instead I must trust the instincts, trust the passion, trust the pursuits I cannot shake. They are right more often than not, and even if they miss the mark, I can walk away with only the right regrets.

One of the beauties of being a writer, one that helps immensely when wrestling with tough questions, is that I have often pre-written the words I need to deal with just about anything. I reread parts of my blog in trying times this year: my last two year-end posts, the posts about my travels, each of which finds new ways to reveal something about who I am. But the core is the fiction I play around with, where the relevance of a few passages are obvious enough.

Here, a character named Evan ponders the suicide of his father some years prior:

It strikes him suddenly that, unlike ever-questioning Mark, he’s never really been consumed asking why. He wonders what went through his father’s mind, certainly, and wishes he’d had the power break his fall, been given some insight into the sickness that plagued the man so that he could have expended every ounce of his energy into saving him. Easy to say now, he thinks, but he does like to believe he could have done so, and even if he couldn’t, would have been able to make peace knowing he did all he could.

This is his style, he thinks to himself, a smile growing on his face. He is comfortable in reality, knows his limits, all guided by his faith. Faith in what? It almost doesn’t even matter since it just works for him, day in and day out, the lows never too low.

He wishes he could talk to his dad again, yes. He knows he carries some part of him inside him. He will never know what could have been. And yet, there it is: from the start, he’s managed to accept that nothing he can do can change what is done, and that it is his solemn task to take tragedy and turn it into something that can empower him. It seems almost cold. He can picture himself trying to explain this to his mother or Bridget and coming off as robotic, the self-improvement machine moving on with no need for pity. Perhaps this is why he can’t say a word about it.

And then Evan’s friend Mark, running trails on Nantucket, hung over after the pursuit of a woman did not go quite as planned:

He’s not quite sure how long his agony lasts, whether it is five minutes or half an hour, but it doesn’t matter. This is more than some stray hangover. He is a piece of trash, a useless scum, a kid with promise who’s pissing it away in a silly performative world of endless nothing. This will be the end of the line, the wake-up call he needs and the liberation of a sickened soul. No more descents into hedonism without purpose, no more sad nights alone in his room. And then there, squatting in a bush, clothing caked in sweat, hands buried deep in his disheveled hair, he turns his gaze upward and his closed eyes perceive the world through those of a child, future or past he cannot be sure, and suddenly he feels the pain easing away, drained out into this sandy Nantucket soil where it can remain.

Mark rises and begins a steady trot back to the beach house, ready to guide his charges out on a tour of the island’s lighthouses and feed them a fresh seafood dinner. His stomach rumbles softly. The wind tugs his hair in and out of his eyes. He smiles a manic smile. He’s found his pace.

I thought of these words as I laughed off a theatrical stumble on a ridgetop trail run of my own the weekend of my breakup. It hurt, but I kept on going, and there is so much to look forward to. Family holiday season is upon us. Winter is here. Ski trails beckon and hockey rinks call. I have next adventures to plan, decisions to make over how to pursue deeper commitments. A ferocity of life takes hold, and I push onward at my own pace.