When I lived in San Francisco I missed the seasons most of all. I didn’t miss the cold, cold winter or the baking heat of the summer. I missed something that marked the passage of time. I missed knowing a year had gone by and somehow, I was making progress, toward what I don’t know but if I could control nothing at least the year ticking by could be counted on to happen no matter what. Maybe that is why we make such a big deal out of New Years Eve, its a way to put the past behind us and start fresh where having a birthday is only a reminder of your aging without any closure to the year before. Maybe birthdays should be a celebration of the year past and done with.

We look to make peace with what we have lived through and absolve ourselves for all of our mistakes and the things we do as humans, and give ourselves another chance. C’est la vie, and lets move on and celebrate. I think we need to have resolve about our past in order to move forward in a healthy way. But a toast of champagne and a song we only barely know the first verse of sung drunkenly once a year doesn’t usually get us there. New Years Eves should be spent alone camping in the woods, making a fire pit in witch to burn sins and mistakes of the past in. That should be what we are driven to do, instead of an excuse to drink more. Drinking could be a part of it too I suppose. The summers I spent drinking Jeremiah Weed (a honey whisky with alleged hallucinogenic tendencies) around a bonfire come to mind as something that could have worked the same way. Maybe my former ancestors, the monks in the hills of Scotland, would celebrate the winter solstice the same way. This year in Manhattan there was a flatbed truck carrying a huge paper shredder. People lined up to shred things small and in bulk. Divorce agreements, bills after declaring bankruptcy, secrets, evidence and memories. 

It is not easy to let go of the past, it can get its claws into you pretty good. It is a part of you, it is what makes you who you are and imprints on your psyche enough to change all actions in the future. Its how we learn. We make mistakes, and make correct choices by accident or on purpose. Some of it is just what randomly spiraled into your life that day amongst the chaos,  but most of it was attraction. You drew to you the people and scenarios likely to fit. Like an SSRI, you fit in there. You matched, even if it was an unhealthy place, you were unhealthy then too. It is no chance that I am surrounded by the people I am surrounded by now. Some of them know everything about me and love me anyway and because of. Others I selectively share my past with, and still others are all about that moment and possible moments in the future. They do not know the long, long story I have watched, witnessed while my heart beat in my chest reminding me that I was standing there. I have been able to loosen the claws of the past, but still…they are always there these memories. Like in the movie “A Beautiful Mind”, he still sees the people in his imagination. But he doesn’t talk to them anymore. Yes, for some things in my past have, for lack of a better word…haunted. Some memories are just that vivid still.

I do not regret however, not a single thing. I do not wish to go back in time and do things differently. The fact is I wouldn’t have done it differently, I did what I did then because I really didn’t know any better, and made decisions based on whatever info and tools I had to work with at the time. I can understand saying that if you knew now what you new then you would have done it different, but who is to say that you wouldn’t learn what you knew now had you chosen differently at the time. I think we do the best we can, and if we have the capacity to make wise decisions, we do. Thats just the way it goes. So I guess I could say that I wish I had had the ability to have chosen differently at the time.

As I understand it, the brain has a very old part to it, a part we needed when we lived long ago that became a part of us for survival. If I lived as a cave woman, and would be walking along the path and a snake in my peripheral vision would leap out and bite me, then the next time I walked on that same path, a long straight thing would catch my eye and I would jump in reaction to it, my adrenalin would begin flowing, but it was only a stick but I would have reacted as if it were a snake nonetheless. If I kept walking along that path every day for the next ten years, eventually I would learn that not all straight things on the ground are snakes and my reaction would not be the same as it was. Over time you would re-learn what was realistic, probable or likely and you would gain confidence in its statistics every time, to the point where one day you didn’t think about it. And if a snake jumped out at you again, you would call upon that old memory and instantly know to leap out of the way, your fight or flight response would kick in again…and once again over time this reaction would fade. What happens for some people is that over time this fight or flight reaction does not fade and is constantly under the surface and triggered easily. Another example is say you were cut off while driving and you swerved and almost got in an accident. Your heart would race and you would sweat and the big muscles in your body would tense up ready to run or lift if it had to. The next day you may recall it to someone and have a feeling of upsetment but you would not feel as you did when it happened the day before. And over time, you would forget about it or be able to recall the instant without feeling any upsetment or adrenalin at all. What happens to many people is that somewhere along the way, an event happened, or series of events happened and there was no resolve. Somehow it did not fade and did not be put in the filing cabinet of your memories as something in your past and something no longer a threat to you. It is often when the event is so traumatic that no matter how often you think about it, you can not get passed it. And life goes on and you are stuck repeating the event in your head, if only just repeating the emotion of it all. For some it was like it happened yesterday all the time. There are so many guys coming back from Iraq right now with PTSD, for them they are still there, unable to make sense of and get passed a lot of what they saw there, and its claws are in deep and the memories grow more distant but the emotional experience of them doesn’t, and it takes one of any number of triggers to bring it all back again. You do not have to have lived through a war to have PTSD, for some people their home life can be just as traumatic. Weather it be years of emotional and physical abuse or just one traumatic event, there is no peace from it.

For some this happens on a small scale, and they repeat over and over again things in their head to try and get control over it. I see friends of mine do it a lot. We obsess and try and remold things into something graspable. I always think of the U2 song Stuck In a Moment, written about former INXS singer Michael Hutchence upon his death. Without flow there is pain. What I wish for everyone I care about for the new year is not just peace in the world, but inner peace. I don’t mean the new-age version. I mean that I wish people to have resolve from their past. I don’t wish for people to lie to themselves or cover it all up or forget about it. I just wish people to have peace with things and to be able to let go of things they could not control and find peace in that. There is a great book by Pema Chodron called When Things Fall Apart. I recommend this to everyone. It is all about this specifically.

Several years ago I went to a New Years Eve party with about 30 or so strangers, where just before midnight, each of us wrote on a piece of paper one thing we were most proud of, one thing we most regretted and one thing we wished for our future, then we would read them all aloud and then burn the paper in the fire. One guy said that he was ashamed at how he had been treating his brother, was proud of sticking it out at a company that made his job hard for him and resolved to start his own line of clothing. A woman said that she has been drinking too much, was proud that she had gotten up the guts to go out that night and wished she would write more in the future. People were amazingly honest and revealing. And I have never felt so closely connected to a bunch of strangers so quickly. We all seemed so fragile in a way. After we were all done, everyone sat there quietly for a second and then one person broke the ice and made a joke, the music started again and we all had one for the road and piled out the door to a nightclub. I never saw any of those people again.

So following that format sans the incineration, I would say that my biggest regret of the year was that I did not ask for help more than I should have, my pride got in the way. I am most proud of myself for having found the strength to have two babies naturally and have worked really hard at being a good parent and I made a huge commitment to Tom. The children and the marriage are both a huge responsibility I don’t take lightly. My hope for this year and I guess you could say my New Years resolution is not to never eat brussel sprouts as I like to joke. But it is to compartmentalize my memories, put them on a shelf and leave them there and move on. And I want to have resolution about any thing broken I can not fix by choosing to not try and keep fixing it. So I guess you could say my resolution is to have some resolve. And have all of those old memories and decisions I have made to be just that… stuff of the past to choose to repeat or never, ever to do again.

For New Years Eve Tom and I put the kids to sleep and made dinner together and opened a good bottle of red wine and lit candles and talked about some of the memorable things we have done over the last 5 years together. Like old people we were in bed asleep by 11, we couldn’t keep our eyes open. But we woke up to the neighborhood wide calamity at midnight. I have never heard such an enthusiastic bunch of people, this block went crazy for a half an hour straight. Lighting fire-crackers, banging pots and pans, lighting m-80’s, blowing air-horns, yelling Happy New Year! Every age little kids up to old ladies in the street wearing pointed party hats whoopin’ it up. What a strange thing we do! And to do it all so publicly? The next day it rained and everything was closed so everyone stayed in and nursed their hangovers privately. Not much had changed, another day in the calendar had ticked by. But I guess now we had closure.

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