The shape-shifting self is never static

The first week of January has me feeling like I don't want to climb out of bed and into the new year. So I reach for the wise voices with clues to my extended hibernation.

Maybe it is my cold with its body aches and sniffles that has me not wanting to get out of bed or dressed or out in the world functioning in my usual productive way.

Maybe it is the strangeness of living in a small one-bedroom apartment again after 33 years of living in houses with my ex-spouse, like being parachuted back to my 20s when the mirror tells me I am a woman in my 60s.

Maybe it’s the yearning for what’s to come—so many desires, so many rekindled hopes and dreams—jostling for space amid my anxieties around my aloneness.

Most likely it is a combination of all the above that has me hibernating in the cozy, safe, liminal in-between space of the old-year-not-yet-the new year. Am I the only one who thinks the expectations-free period between Christmas and New Year is too brief? I don’t want to emerge from my cave yet.

But the demands of the new year are calling—client calls, work obligations, a new living space to furnish and sort and tidy. And so to nourish a slow pace as I emerge from my cocoon and back into the world, I turn to the wise voices that are all around me: my daughters, my friends, my coaches, as well as writers, thinkers, musicians and poets. As I ponder this week the hard shell of forgiveness, the true nature of desire, and the gift and the terror of solitude, I take in all the love, encouragement and support surrounding me. Together these voices deepen the wisest voice of all: my own.

Here is a sample of what I’ve been listening to and reading this week, in the hopes it will resonate with your own state of mind and spirit as we move forward in 2024.

Photo by Alexandra Gorn on Unsplash

Clarity

For months now I have been trying to get comfortable with my solitude, my aloneness, as I have written about previously. This effort is a work in progress. I knew the great door of togetherness, of the two of us inhabiting space and time, would clang shut behind me once I initiated the divorce. I just didn’t expect all these echoes, reverberating in the silence: “What have you done?” and “What now?” and even “Who am I, really?”

For clarity, I turn to Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte, which I keep on my nightstand. On the word “Alone” he writes:

“To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever-present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously, and deeply, afraid…Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

The permeability of being alone asks us to reimagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly, hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way, as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence…To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether.”

It is this passage, a little further along, that gives me the deepest solace:

“Aloneness begins in puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates, one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful unlooked-for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light.”

Connection

Of all the podcasts in my ears, the most frequent are Morning Edition and All Things Considered from National Public Radio (NPR) and I love when I hear the kinds of stories on NPR I don’t think I would hear anywhere else.

This week two stories in particular made me think of how humans find connection in the most hostile of surroundings.

“People in prison explain what music means to them—and how they access it” was particularly affecting. As in this quote from Joe Garcia, in state prison in California for a murder conviction, who is a Swiftie, telling NPR: “Taylor Swift's voice, the fairytale romance of it all, takes me back to a much more idyllic time and kind of keeps me focused on recapturing that type of sentiment as I go forward in life."

For Garcia, and the other incarcerated people interviewed, music helps them connect with themselves and each other. "Music is kind of one facet of me trying to open my heart and really appreciate people for who they are. And I really do see that a lot in the other incarcerated guys ... We end up using it as a platform to come together instead of being divisive."

And in another somewhat related story that floated across my consciousness this past week, in Chile’s oldest and most overcrowded prison, hundreds of stray cats keep inmates company, as this New York Times dispatch from Santiago reports:

Prisoners informally adopt the cats, work together to care for them, share their food and beds and, in some cases, have built them little houses. In return, the cats provide something invaluable in a lockup notorious for overcrowding and squalid conditions: love, affection and acceptance.

“Sometimes you’ll be depressed and it’s like she senses that you’re a bit down,” said Reinaldo Rodriguez, 48, who is scheduled to be imprisoned until 2031 on a firearms conviction. “She comes and glues herself to you. She’ll touch her face to yours.”

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