What 2016 Taught Me

2016. It’s been a hell of a year, hasn’t it?

A year of challenges.  Some to a scale I don’t remember having at any previous time in my life.  There have been losses – of life, relationships, hope, faith, respect, and admiration.  But on the flip side, there have been several truly wonderful things that happened this year – creativity, marriages, babies, new jobs, and the discovery of paths as well as new kindred spirits.

A few weeks ago I had a dinner party and posed the question to my guests – both at the table and on my chalkboard wall – what did 2016 teach you? 

 Personally, I think it reframes the difficult moments (through which I have spent not just a few agonizing tear stained hours, days, weeks this year) with opportunity, but it also clarifies the good fortune of being alive in this world in this time.

So this is what 2016 taught me.

1. Happiness is a choice.  And you have to work for it.  There are moments that just happen and the universe clarifies the focus of its beauty and enormous possibility.  But even that, I’m now convinced, is the consequence of putting in the effort when that result isn’t obvious.  By the same token, shit happens and makes the work towards happiness really really challenging.  It forces difficult decisions and combatting fearful choices.  But the reward of a risk well spent is happiness.  It is fleeting – like the transience of a theater performance with that perfect cast or a glass of wine as the sun sets on a summer evening or that glance you catch when you weren’t expecting it.  Moments.  Warm, delicious moments that can thaw and enlighten the cold hardness the world often presents.

2. Unhappiness is also a choice.  Maybe it is a surrender, but a complicit act nonetheless.  It is okay to be sad.  I think for the first time in a long while I gave myself permission to be sad and acknowledge it this year.  But I overstayed the visit and realized I had to make the choice to get out because it made me less of a person.

 

3. Under Pressure.   

This song is probably my theme for 2016.  The fact David Bowie took his last bow certainly put it in my brain, but these lyrics resonate completely:
“Insanity laughs under pressure we're breaking…
Because love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves…”

4. Patience.  Someone gave me an amethyst worry stone with that word etched in gold.  It was a bit of an in joke, but proved to be a recurring theme – showing up in a fortune cookie too.  

 I thought this was a given.  I’ve been known for keeping my cool under a lot of pressure.  I realized this year that patience isn’t merely tolerance.  Putting up with deplorable behavior is not a virtue. But there is something to giving in to the rhythm of the universe and recognizing that eventually things play out as they should.  Karma will show its hand.  I can say that I’ve learned this lesson today.  But three days maybe even hours from now, I will likely lose this zen and be chomping at the bit for a result I want right now… even though I know in my heart of heart that:
“If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.”

5. A fresh coat of paint can change everything.  This summer I painted my office, my kitchen, and my bedroom.  The office has a nice gray to compliment the chalkboard walls where I plot out the wacky timeline of my fiction.  The kitchen is white, brightening up the dull twenty year orange and shadows (not to mention another chalkboard wall where I invite guests to leave awesome answers).  My room is less girly and more earthy so that I sleep better.  Outside my home, I pushed (to a great deal of unnecessary bitter drama) to paint the god awful pink lobby of the theater.  It isn’t completely done yet, but there are few times in my life when I have witnessed such visceral joy as when people walked into rehearsal and saw the pepto abysmal salmon explosion was gone.  It changed people’s attitudes and caused a minor major earthquake in our little theater.  Amazing what a can of paint can do.

6. You say you want a revolution?  The start of this bleeds back to 2015, when I plunged into research for my time travel Irish American history saga.  I escaped my misery this winter by reading up on the hardships of my ancestors and their kin.  Irish immigrants at war with one another on the disease ridden Island in Worcester or struggling to build a community in a prospering Industrial city at the end of the 19^th century or fighting for independence back in the 18^th century.  I had no idea – none – of the role my town and the towns around it played in the years leading up to the Battle of Lexington and Concord.  I had no knowledge of the ‘peaceful’ protests and horrific division between neighbors before a shot was fired on a battlefield.  It’s all great fodder for a novel.  It provokes me to look for the ghosts of farms on my morning walks or my daily commute through the rural hills of Central Mass.  And as our current day tore itself apart over an election and the idiotic vitriol, I saw how far we came and took for granted and didn’t really learn at all.

7. Someone said boycott Hamilton.  So I started listening to it.  REALLY listening to it.  I fell in love.  Especially because of everything I had been reading at the start of the year and imagined about how women and non-whites had a role in the revolution.  And it makes me think, what are we going to do now?

8. I found Fitchburg.  I always knew it was there.  My great aunt lived there and would come to cookouts to tell me about the great culture of theater and the museum and other activities her retirement community offered after my great uncle passed away.  I knew the theater she frequented, so much they put up a plaque in her name before it burned down.  But I never went to see it.  I went to the city to go to some franchise restaurant or other.  Or maybe it was Leominster.  One of those north Central Massachusetts cities that I knew held importance in the whole grand scheme of what was once great industry but wasn’t Worcester.  Now I go there every day.  I’ve learned the shortcuts to bypass traffic.  We walk down Main Street and I learn about what was once there and see in discussions and meetings what could be there.  I want to know it more.  I want to see what it has to offer and teach me still.

9. I can live without sugar.  I gave up sugar for a month in the fall.  A large part of that was wine.  Like all things, the first few steps are the most challenging.  It’s also easy to fall into step with the bad habit with the holidays.  But the bad habit is muted and it will be easier to revisit that reduction after Epiphany.

10. I discovered Agnes Obel.  Probably one night of internet skulking when I wasn’t writing.  But she has helped me write at 6am many mornings since.

11. Time.  There is always time for things that matter and never enough time to do it all.  Time is a limited commodity, but it is something we can decide to put aside for people and projects that are valuable.  It is also remarkably easy to waste.  Especially when there is only one thing to do.  Like, say, write.

12. It is really tough to be a woman in a position of responsibility.  I’ve always been a feminist, but not until this year have I witnessed or experienced the cruelty that people (including and maybe even most fiercely, other women) exert against women in power.  I don’t understand it.  I hope I can learn in the years to come how to be better and more… patient about the illogical vitriol that comes with it.

13.  No matter what, that tail wag when you come in the door makes it all good.

14. It is possible to be happy and sad at the same time.  November 8^th was a really good day.  I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to the MFA and spend some more time with my co-workers.  I think that was when I realized that 2016 had turned 180 degrees from the start.  I liked my job, the people with whom I work, and the opportunities it gives my imagination, my intellect, and my heart.  I got to see beautiful paintings, geek out because I remembered the name Okakuro Kakuzo, and had a delicious pumpkin cheesecake.  It was also in the midst of a very successful musical that I directed with a cast that felt like family.  A happy warm glow was all around my psyche.  Then I went home that night and my soul was crushed by the election results.  I was heartbroken to see a bully and rapist put in a position of power and fear triumphed just as I was feeling so great about the world.  At the same time a smaller scale bully unleashed her wrath because happiness doesn’t belong to everyone and I just marveled at the fact that I could feel so joyful and so awful at the same time.  But luckily that musical had the perfect lyrics to express the complexity of that emotion for me:
“Life is full of contradictions, every inch a mile.
And the moment we start weeping,
that's when we should smile.
In every Heaven, you'll find some Hell.
And there's a welcome in each farewell.
Life can be harsh, the future strict
Who would dare predict....
So let's be happy
Forever happy
Completely happy
And a tiny bit
Sad.”

15. I’ve learned a lot

16. I have so much more to learn.  Or learn again.   I want to do more research for my novels – I have all these random Irish American Worcester history books yet to read.  I also want to learn another language and new recipes and meet new people.  I want to know more, understand more, see a broader vision.  Life is humbling.  It is beautiful.  Full of possibility.  And you never know what is coming next.

So let’s be happy, forever happy and a tiny bit sad.