A (New) Year

How curious!

Indeed, how very curious. It is a new year, and yesterday was the end of another. Of course there is nothing more "new" about today than there was to yesterday, andour notions of time are relative and arbitrary, but last night I felt the full weight of this relativity replace the load already on my shoulders as I walked alone through the streets of London.

I listened to the Shins, Aimee Mann, and Sufjan Stevens and remembered walking through so many other cities by the same songs. Suddenly before me were little memories, little moments that are long gone but somehow strikingly vivid. Before me were faces of girls I had loved, one beside me as I drove, another guiding me as we walked, another sitting along in the backseat as my father drove us from the airport.

And there were worries in my heart in each of those times, too. And somehow the memories, those time-places or temporal stations, those seasons are beautiful still. I look at them fondly and treasure them. My current worries lost their cumbersome immediacy and with it their power, their weight.

As Sufjan Stevens's "Transfiguration Motif" played in "Chicago," I felt changed myself. I imagined that my problems now will see little resolution regardless of the New Year, and will be with me for some time. But they are no end, in and of themselves! They are no crushing sum total of life and my time here. They are peripheral. Soon I will look back on these days fondly, and they will be beautiful still. I will take the good with the bad.

For the first time in a long time, I am hopeful of the days to come.