Hello From Between The Years

I’ve been staring at the keyboard for hours. 

Starting a piece. 

Stopping. 

Deleting and starting again. 

After doing this a few times, I realized that this is a pretty good analogy for this year.

I started a piece about a greatest hits of New Year’s Eves from my lifetime. But scrolling through my photos of where I was on December 31sts gone, I found I didn’t want to dwell in the past. There were some great ones. But to honest, I’m tired of seeing #TBT social postings of everything that we did. I don’t want to hear any more about the things we miss. I don’t know why.

So then I kicked off another that was a year-end wrap up of 2021. I was going to write a pretend Year That Was, of the year we haven’t had yet. But it got real bitchy, real fast. Revenge fates on all those in charge who made our year more dangerous and deadly. And fantasies of a global consciousness being raised to something I know it won’t be. Not in the next twelve months anyway. Although I did have a great ending in mind with aliens making first contact. The friendly kind. Not the blow up your planet and eat you all kind.

Then in an OMG-I’m-so-clever moment, I was going to try and start a card sending initiative where we all post each other hand-written New Years Cards. Like in an envelope with a stamp. To celebrate the end of 2020. But I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for that idea either.

Me and the laptop. 

Starting things. 

Stopping things. 

Pushing against walls. 

Staring blankly at them. 

A desire to go but finding nowhere to go. Which makes writing this last Berlin Stories of 2020 a strange and empty experience.

Here in Germany, the time between Xmas and New Year’s Eve is called “Zwischen den Jahren,” or “Between The Years.” It’s a period that, as I understand it, belongs to neither the year you are in nor the one coming. It’s a time to reflect on the year that’s passed. And think about the year ahead, and the plans you make for it.

Between the Years is about allowing the three hundred and fifty-eight days you’ve just sprinted through to land. But all we’ve done this year is sit still and let the year land. For nine months now in fact.

And with the rollout of vaccines taking till maybe April to filter down to the majority of people (who are lucky enough to not be in harm’s way like front line medical staff or suffering a threatening medical condition) the start of 2021 is going to more of the same.

Normally there is a worldwide turning of our gaze to the new year and all the promise that it holds. How it is going to be radically different. And how we are going to be radically different in it. That as the clock ticks to midnight, a metaphorical magic wand is waved that makes all the juju of the last twelve months disappear.

We are washed clean. And the slate is too. 

The energy of this annual communal mental ritual has always propelled me into the next twelve months full of plans and vigor.

But I find it very hard to muster any of that excitement this year. Then I think, how can I expect myself to? How can any of us?

Because we are all between the years right now. Only it isn’t a week. We’ve been between the years for nine months.

I meditate for twenty minutes most mornings. My session has a start bell, then a five, ten and fifteen minute chime, and a final gong at twenty. And it always follows the same rhythm. I have what they call, “Monkey Mind” for the first ten minutes. My brain will not shut up. I’ll think about a hundred problems, solve none of them, return to my breathing, only to find I’ve ping-ponged over to obsess on some other random thought.

Then somehow, and I don’t know how, I’m calm. halfway through, I accept that these twenty minutes are going to happen and I surrender to the ride. Then everything goes quiet. Sometimes I don’t even remember hearing the fifteen minute chime.

But here’s the wildest part. When the final gong sounds at twenty minutes I don’t open my eyes. Now that the time where I have to do it is gone, when I’m no longer kicking against it, it’s suddenly the easiest thing in the world to have an empty mind. With no clock, no judgement, and no expectation.

If there is a thought, it’s me wondering why this is now easy when just minutes before it was a task. And I can, and sometimes have, sit there for another hour, oblivious to the day passing. Neither in the world, nor in the beyond. Just floating in between.

But I do eventually open my eyes. And then spend a lot of the waking day, in the past that I can’t change or let go. Or in the future that I’m afraid of and yet also can’t control.

I think we’re all at that point right now, the bit before we’ve opened our eyes. It’s just happening. We’ve given up pushing against it. May as well go with it.

I always thought if I’d achieved this feeling of open-eyed present state living, it would have come via some amazing transcendental breakthrough. A result of one of my many, many plans that didn’t happen this year of going to a retreat in India and just doing spiritual work for a month. That I’d levitate by the time I left the ashram. Emit light from my palms and eyes. That Buddha would follow me on Instagram and comment on my posts.

For while I’m nursing no more resentment now for the year I feel I didn’t have, I’m also not trying to control the one coming either. I’m just here. In the present. Not having given up. Not waiting even. Just here.

A poet friend of mine once said that writers write to reveal things to themselves. And it’s taken me to write this to actually figure out what I’ve been feeling for this last week.

Because I don’t think I’ve ever felt this calm with my eyes open. How strange and new. Which is not a bad way to describe 2020 either.

Maybe you’ve been feeling it too and aren’t sure what it is or what it means. Maybe it’s the same thing I’ve got.

And while there’s part of me that thinks, I have to do something with this, the better part of me realizes that I already am. Just doing it.

So if you find yourself seeing out this year is a strangely calm state that seems very out of character, I’m doing the same thing. And I’ll see you next year. Not on January 1. But whenever next year actually does eventually begin. And our extended, “Zwischen den Jahren” actually ends.

This time though, when I open my eyes, I’m hoping I don’t end up in the past again or fretting about the future. But that I stay exactly where I am. 

Here.