Wondering into the New Year
On curiosity, wonder, and another quiet NYE
“To be curious is to be wonder prone.” — Busshō Lahn, “The Courage of Curiosity”1
On the eve of the new year, like so many eves before, I am home. The Christmas tree and the candles are softly glowing. My dog is completely horizontal near my feet. My party clothes are soft pants, and my drink is a spiced hard cider. Later, I will knock off before midnight, wash my face, crawl into bed, and read The Priory of the Orange Tree until I can’t keep my eyes open.
A normal winter night, except the part where the year our linear timekeeping calls 2022 fades away into memory and history books.
Sometimes I wish I was doing something a little more celebratory, but quiet nights at home are their own kind of tradition. I remember in my 20s, I’d sit in my room and journal with Switchfoot’s song “The Blues” playing in my headphones2, while the annual Twilight Zone marathon played in the background on whatever cable channel did that.
One of the more memorable years was 2013, when Chris and I were long distance dating and he flew into Orlando so we could celebrate together. One big flight delay later, I was canceling our dinner reservations and picking him up around 9pm. We got dinner at a random Chili’s then found some lakeside neighborhood fireworks closer to home.
It was not at all my original, epic, Yay-First-New-Year-Together plan. But when I hold that memory up to our actual lived-in lives, it feels exactly right. Staying open and finding our own kind of magic.
***
Yesterday a friend asked if I’d made any New Year’s resolutions, and I realized that’s another tradition I don’t necessarily follow. I mean, I love reflecting on the year that was, marking it, and setting some loose intentions or hopes. I just always feel like making a resolution is asking for self-sabatoge.
In theory, I like the Word of the Year approach I see some folks take. I love finding themes and making connections out of all the year’s loose threads. But when I tried to set a word in the past, I’d just forget about it a few weeks later, once the sheen of January had rubbed off.
This year though, maybe I found one?
A few days ago, we were walking Malika in the woods. It was one of those perfect winter days, cold but not too much, the sky smooth and bright like a robin eggshell above the trees. These are the days when the sun doesn’t quite make it all the way up to high noon, but instead hovers golden and tired, casting long shadows between the bare trees.
In the distance, I thought I heard voices. It was probably real, another hiker calling to her kids or her dogs or something. But in my heart, I wanted it to be something magic, something fey. I wanted to believe these woods might be a border between the stuff of earth and the realm of spirit.
I ached to reclaim magic. And quietly, a single word surfaced.
Wonder.
It’s a verb: to ponder, ask questions and be curious about things we don’t know. And it’s a noun for that feeling of awe, being struck speechless by something you can’t explain. It sounds pleasantly close to “wander” too — meandering, rambling, not purposefully charging into the next thing.
What would it look like to reclaim wonder, awe, a sense of place and, yes, joy? This old year wasn’t a bad year, but it had some really hard parts that cast a gloomy shadow over the better days. Sometimes the best I could do was put my head down and keep marching into the next day, doing my work, keeping appointments, only to later space out on Instagram to fill idle moments.
This year was marked to by something like a dark night of the soul. Quiet doubts surfacing, spiritual practices feeling empty, God seeming absent, questions and dread rising up then getting stuffed back into the mental drawers for later.
What would it look like to follow curiosity, to seek wonder, to figure out what I do for fun and what would bring me joy? What would it look like to let that openness be my guide?
So I guess I have a word this year: Wonder.
I’m still working out how I will chase that wonder on a practical level. But at least I have a lodestar for my wandering and a hint of an invitation.
Setting out into a new year, that will have to be enough.
And that’s all I’ve got. Happy New Year! I’ll be taking a couple weeks off from scrolling the social medias, and hopefully using that space to write and think about how this Substack thing is gonna work.
Alas, it’s behind a member paywall, but this article is in the latest issue of Presence Journal from Spiritual Directors International, and the timing was pretty great.
Clearly, I know how to party.