new year’s pause

happy 2022, world. and welcome to your first day of promises and resolutions.

i find that this day, the first day of a new year, is a day of pause. it feels like once halloween is in the rear-view mirror, the clock to the end of the year begins to tick at a breakneck pace until finally, that crystal ball drops, the confetti flies, and the new year is here. and for one day, the first day, finally, we pause.

as words go this fine day, i find myself dwelling in the one that has been in the ether since the early days of 2020: fear.

it is, of course, not a new word, nor a new feeling. a thousand reasons to be fearful have come and gone in each of our lives. but lately, our collective existence is defined by it, by what we say and do about it in ourselves, and how empathetic we are to it in others.

recently, one friend described other people’s fears as “hysterical.”

another friend, having recently conquered many of her own lifelong fears, does not acknowledge anyone else’s as valid.

yet others, the ones i keep close, stick with me in my fear, hold my hand through it, or share their own with me, helping me feel less alone in it.

we tend to hold a certain judgement about these difficult emotions. we may even judge the person who experiences them. anger, sadness, fear, these are not easy things to face or express. even when we’re clear and honest in our expression of them, they are not often well-received or delicately handled. just the other day, i expressed fear over my elderly mom and the recent wave of contagious illness. it was met with heartfelt advice on the acceptance of God’s will, including the possibility of death. those were not words i wanted or needed in that moment.

there are a thousand layers underneath each of our responses to fear and other difficult emotions, in ourselves and in others. we are, after all, human beings raised by other human beings managing a complicated world, and it takes the long, hard work of introspection to understand ourselves.

i wonder, though, how differently our conversations about fear – or anger or sadness – would go if we were to embrace the pause of this new year’s day and say, very simply, “i understand.”