Becca Rowan is a writer and the author of Life in General, a collection of essays about mid-life as experienced by an American woman in the 21st century. Becca loves creating connections by sharing stories on her popular blog.
Happy Friday, and a happy official ending to the first full week of 2016. It’s been a busier one than I would have liked, especially after spending the two weeks of Christmastide doing virtually nothing and sleeping until 9 or 10 each morning. But we hit the ground running on Monday, and haven’t stopped since.
Amidst rehearsals and meetings and doctor appointments this week, there was a lovely oasis of time on Tuesday evening...
Here it is, a shiny new year.
I’m really love New Year’s Day, and certainly not because of football. I love a clean slate, and what better one than a brand, spanking New Year, complete with new calendars, new notebooks, and fresh new opportunities. No matter what’s happened in the waning days of the old year, January First is a harbinger of possibility and change.
Hibernating, burrowing, hunkering in - that’s what we’ve been focused on during these liminal weeks between the years. The climate this winter has been more than kind - until yesterday when the first snow and ice of the season rained down upon us, we have been graced with dry sidewalks and more than unusually mild temperatures. Still, it’s felt like a time to be quiet, to gather stores in for lean times ahead. Nature sends us so many messages if we only will listen. From deep within ourselves comes the desire to slow down, be still, restore strength and energy. Life often prevents us from heeding this call, or we shove it aside in favor of productivity and sociability and the busy-ness that passes for accomplishment.
It’s that time again - the annual Best of the Year Lists. 2015 was the first year I’ve used Goodreads to catalog, rate, and track my reading, which makes compiling my Best Books list a little more interesting than in past years, when I’ve simply perused the pages of my reading journal for those entries I’ve starred as favorites.
My personal criteria for a Best Book classification? One that captures my emotional interest; one that has appealing, believable, fully developed characters; one with an interesting plot or story line; one that makes me feel “writerly” (to quote my friend Melissa- in other words, a book that makes me itch to get to my own pen and paper and start writing myself). The final requirement, and probably the most important one, is that it must be a book I can imagine myself re-reading, either in a year, five years, or even 10. Even as was writing this list, I felt the urge to go downstairs to my shelves and grab each one of these to re-read.
It seems to me there is a definite lack of Christmas/Holiday spirit around these parts.
And this year, it’s not just me - the perpetual Grinch who clamps her hands over her ears as soon as the radio stations go “all carols all the time.” It’s evident from the decreased amount of outdoor decorations in our community and in the surrounding neighborhoods to the weary social media posts and blog essays, people are having a hard time getting into the spirit of this thing we call Christmas.
