New Goodbyes

Almost every year I can remember, I've stopped on New Year's Eve and made a list of resolutions. Or revelations or determinations or dreams or whatever I happen to call them that year. I love it. Not because it makes me successful or any cooler of a person. But because it's a time I can spend looking at what I have and imagining where I want to go and maybe, just maybe, learning again to love all the amazing pieces of my life.

This year I haven't given it the slightest thought. I've got thirty-four minutes left of two-thousand fourteen...I wonder how many times I've smiled this year. How many times I spilled something down my shirt and managed to laugh instead of cry. I remember reading something once that went a bit like this: "Sometimes there are only two options left - to laugh, or to cry. And laughing just seems better right now." It doesn't mean you can handle what's been dished onto your plate. It doesn't mean that you even want to try.

What it means is that you have decided to be alive. When it hurts. When it's dark outside. When your heart just shattered against the wall. When every dream you held close was torn out of your hands in a tornado-like wind.

Every morning I hear my alarm and I turn into Scrooge, bah humbug-ing the day and trying to pretend that I have hours more to sleep. Something strange happens, though, when I prepare for the day ahead. Tentatively at first, and then boisterously, I find that people exist in such an uncommon way, that I can't help but laugh at their personalities, smile at their small conquests, roll my eyes at their drama, wince at their sorrows. Life (the part where we're breathing while at the same time thinking and probably focusing on some secret agenda, too) is not a cursory item.

If life isn't cursory, than everything we do (while, you know, being alive) happens to be important. I know that this is all stemming from the crazy love that God has for me, but right now I can't dig that deep. All I know is that I am here, facing another year of the unknown, and I can barely walk straight. It's quite hilarious to watch from above, I'm sure.

I don't have any resolutions this time around. The New Year is coming to get me, not the other way around. All I have is this precious second to exist in every way possible. What will you do as you breathe?