NYE2010

It's New Year's Eve 2010, and today I'm making an exception from my frustrating tendency to continually grasp for the unattained. Today, the end of a year, the end of a decade, I'm instead swimming in recognition, not of how far I've yet to go, but how far I have come.

This time ten years ago, I was working at the Stanthorpe Border Post, excited and nervous about my move to the big time at the Warwick Daily News. Little did I anticipate that move would take me, step by occasionally-backwards-step, all the way to Canada and this life of perpetual hope.

In the last ten years I have built a career then lost it from my ambivalent grip, watched someone die, kissed my baby nephew, wrote good words and bad, won some awards and lost others, destroyed all respect for myself and painfully pieced it back together, and through it all yearned for something I couldn't name. My feet led my heart, my heart fought my head. I chased things I should have let go, and let go things I should have chased. Mistakes were myriad.

And then -- be it thanks to the wisdom of ageing, or simply the learning of lessons life kept dumping on my doorstep -- everything has come to this moment of perfection. Tonight, T. and I will celebrate the end of a decade, and the beginning of another with so many dawnings in our world I fear we will be dazzled to blindness.

A year ago, I was  scratching in the sand, busying myself filling bag after bag to hold back the flood of desperation I knew was rising all around us. Tonight, we step into a new world. T. is striding confidently in the direction of his dreams, grounded in the soil of goodness, reaching for a pure light. The boys are wonderfully close, and the ties are binding strong and gentle around us all. I am about to start a job so perfect I'd dared not imagine until now, beside a wonderful man, a dazzling love, and a life filled with good friends and family far and near.

Today, may you also let go of the to-do list, and take stock of this moment, your moment. All of that pain and struggle and love and laughter, the loss, discovery, and challenge of simply leading a good life, it is transcendent. 

Bring on the light.

I am finally ready to see.