On Endings and Beginnings – St Lucia – [12/31/2011]

Each ending is only a beginning after all…

Normally on the last day of the year I look back and chronicle everything that’s gone on in the last 365 days…but 2011 has been simultaneously rock steady predicable and yet so unpredictable that I can’t think what to say about it. And yes, it is perfectly plausible for something to be both those things at the same time.

A lot of what happened in the last year is not mine to talk about as it deals with other people’s lives and other people’s circumstances in which I played only a peripheral part. The parts that were major for me? Well, they’re not really all that interesting and have more to do with the girl I see in the mirror than the woman the rest of the world observes.

I used to approach the New Year with a bang, a kind of determined enthusiasm that this time nothing life threw at me was going to be bring me down. I eventually came to discover that as honorable as those intentions are, they never really work the way you think they will. That’s not to say that it’s better to be cynical – far from it – it’s more that life simply isn’t predicable, you can’t say that nothing bad is going to happen, because you never know what  life is going to bring, positive or negative. And sometimes negatives are positives in disguise, and vice versa.

Now, instead of sparkle and glitter, I approach the coming year with cautious positive calm. The coming 365 days are a blank slate, on which I can create anything I choose, in which I can make anything of myself. It’s a heady thing really, if you think about it that way. 365 new chances, 525,600 opportunities to be the person you’ve always wanted to be.

And inevitably I will fall, there will be moments when I look down instead of up, when I curse and rail and wonder “why me”?

But nothing the world has thrown at me has beaten me yet. 2011 was a good year over all, a year in which I fought my dragons and overcame most of them, I think I even tamed some of them to keep as pets (they’re not such bad company, dragons, once you get used to them.), and I find myself able to look to 2012 – whatever it may bring (and contrary to modern mythology, I’m pretty certain it will not bring about the end of the world), and be only mildly curious as to what it might contain.

For right now? I sit at my desk, all in red, and think about the places I wish I were and the people I wish I were with, whose arms I wish I were in, who’s glass I wish I were clinking mine against. But after I’ve done with that, I look along my own personal train tracks, laid down with blood sweat and tears and personal dedication over the years….I shed my shoes and balance barefoot along the rails, holding my arms out like a child balancing on a tight-rope…and after a while, I pause to look out at the landscape…

And realize…it’s one helluva view.

For my wish to the rest of you, I dive back towards my distant Irish roots and say:

May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be ever at your back, and may the God/dess shelter you in the palm of Her hand.

Bright blessings for a joyous and prosperous 2012

Shaughnessy