Old Year, New Year and “One Art”

Hidden Brain re-posted their “Loss and Renewal” episode for New Year’s. Listen for the story, but keep this reminder: we’re different this year than we were last year, and we’ll be different next year than we were this year. Maybe not a lot. Maybe not in a better (or worse) way. But, different. As Sage Francis said, “different in a different way.”

The episode ends with Aimee Mann reciting “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. It’s one of those poems that beats you up a little more every time you read it, and if you read it right, it toughens you up too. If we’re going to be different, adding some resiliency isn’t going to hurt. Mastering losing isn’t hard, and life gives us plenty of small chances every single day to lose “stuff.” That’s the only way to be ready for the big ones as Bishop confesses, “the art of losing’s not hard to master / though it may look like…like disaster.”

So out goes the old year and in comes the new. 2018 is the first loss to acknowledge. Cheers to the incremental losses along the way to 2020. They’re coming whether we want them to or not. Even if they look like disaster.

Here’s to losing, disasters, and (hopefully) mastery.