Marking Time and Making Maps

When Covid first came, I started numbering the days, as if our days might be numbered. After a year, I stopped. Our days are always numbered, and it's difficult to think about without getting into the thicket of when a thing "began," since there is always something before the thing we call the beginning.

Marking time is an innate human impulse as well as an ancient practice, one that gives us some sense of containment and order in an otherwise vast universe. Whether it's the rise and fall of the sun, the births and deaths of your beloveds, or the nature of what's growing and what's decaying, we all have our ways of keeping track. I often suggest to folks creating a visual timeline -- it might be horizontal, on big paper on the wall, or it might be a series of circles orbiting each other like moons. This helps us see how different moments and events relate to each other, and, perhaps even more importantly, it helps us locate ourselves and identify not only our personal experiences but also where they fit in a larger context, be it familiar, societal, cultural, historical, or a combination of these. After all, nothing happens in a vacuum.

The creative process, like life, is a constant series of zooming in and zooming out, going big and going small. Sometimes one is called for, sometimes the other. When you are unable to see beyond a particular experience, what gives you a sense of perspective and context? When you are overwhelmed, what details ground you and return you back to the present moment?

Solstice is one such marker. As a Capricorn, the day heralds my birth season and always feels like a homecoming of sorts. The longest night also delivers a whisper of something hopeful: The light will return. Incrementally, day by day by day, the days will once again lengthen and stretch, until spring once again yawns awake.

We are animals who forget we are animals. We are nature that forgets we are nature. We are elegant and explosive, thousands of synapses firing like so many stars, impossible to fathom despite all the science in the world. Change is often difficult to see, within as well as without. It is very, very easy to succumb to a sense that nothing is moving. But this, my friends, is never the case. Everything is moving all the time, whether we perceive it or not.

In this last week of the calendar year, these dark, quiet nights, maybe our task is to get so quiet and still that we sense into the subtle change that is every moment, body, breath, blink. In a world that hurries us along to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing after that, when do we slow down enough to feel ourselves in space and time? When do we remember that we are also the day and the night, the return of the light, the turn of the season, the absence of linear time and the here and now that is always?

Seven years ago this month, I led my first two-week online writing group on something of a desperate whim. Some frightening things were happening in my own life; reaching out a hand in the dark was a way of reminding myself that there were others here, others seeking connection and a place where the truths and questions and fears and memories and stories could come tumbling out.

If there is one thing I’ve learned since then – and continue to learn – it’s that I am always (or never not, as the case may be) somewhere in this process of locating myself. The path is never what you think it will be, and so the work becomes to keep paying attention to where you find yourself. And that if you're headed somewhere other than where you want to go, you can pause. Assess your whereabouts. Reorient yourself. And yes, change direction.

I asked a client the other day, "Where are you?" "In my room," she replied. I had meant, where are you, in a more meta sense, and her answer was just so perfect. It brought us back to the moment.

So here I am, in my kitchen. As I've been writing this, the first light has become visible through the thick pine branches. We're here. We're nearly two years into a pandemic. We're here, at the end of 2021. I no longer number the days or the dispatches. I only know that for as long as we're here, there is the chance to create new maps.

I won't say a word about intentions or resolutions. But I will invite you, if you feel like spending some time with pens and paper and perhaps even glue and markers and magazines, to make a map as we head towards the new year. You might ask yourself some questions, such as: Where have I been? Where am I right now? Where am I headed?

I'm taking the rest of the month off to do a whole lotta nothing. Please stay safe out there and do your part in keeping others safe, too. We need you. I am deeply grateful for the fact that I get to write and reach out and coach and connect for a living, and that you are out there being you in the world. Let’s keep finding ourselves and each other in space and time. Let’s keep making maps and meaning. Let’s keep going.