The new year dawning

I love odd, meandering dreams. I don't have (or remember) them often enough, but I woke up from one today just as a minor plot point had been revealed: There was a new "Wayne"--that is, Mike Myers was no longer the affable cable-access show host in Aurora, Illinois. Someone else would play him.

As if! I'm not sure where that came from, but my waking mind moved next to the idea of shedding one's skin. That's as apt a metaphor as any for the last day of 2017, and it's when I knew I needed to get up and write something.

New Year's Day is often a time when we commit to something new. I've recently begun a new practice I plan to continue in the new year: reading an essay on paper (not online) first thing most mornings, then writing a bit (also on paper) about what I've read, and maybe just a bit about what's happening in my life, too. I've mostly been reading works at random from The Best American Essays 2017. I'll recount a few themes from memory:

A woman pieces together the fragments of the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history, at Hawk's Nest, West Virginia, where hundreds of men digging a tunnel died slow deaths.

A man with cerebral palsy recounts acting in The Wizard of Oz as a boy, and meeting one of the Munchkins from the famous film.

A woman works a low-wage job in a hospital ER while paying off the five-figure debt she incurred  trying to take her own life.

Two young men in Harare, Zimbabwe, try to raise money to come to college in America. They have scholarships, but they need travel funds and living expenses.

A woman and her two daughters abandon their life in California to seek a new one, with new identities, in Colorado. (This one had me at its early mention of that kid-lit classic The Monster at the End of this Book.)

A young couple from the Midwest leave their hipster town for life in a very cheap backwater along the Great Lakes.

I dream of someday reading for fun many hours each day. But since I must read--and read closely--for my work as an editor, I rarely take time each day for leisure reading. These early-morning sessions are my attempt to do that, and I love how the essays give me glimpses of how other people are living--and often how they're shedding their skins to do or be or see something new. To grow.

In last night's dream, I also remember recounting to someone the blogs I've written over the years. Well, today actually is the third anniversary of Surely Joy. I started it as a resolution of sorts with two posts at the tail end of 2014, and while I don't write here all that often, I'm grateful to have somewhere to write.

Happy new year, and may 2018 be a year of new insights, growth, and of course joy for us all.





via GIPHY