New Year backwards

As 2018 begins so does the discussion on resolutions. In Hope for the New Year Ellen Peterson talks about words of intention, their success and failure. And then she mentioned (tongue in cheek) her success. The year she chose perseverance.


“I succeeded to make it into the following year because all I really needed to do was KEEP BREATHING.”


In this blog snippet, Ellen encapsulates my thinking at this time of year. Instead of looking forward, it has come to make more sense for me to look back.


Buz and I, like many Canadian seniors, winter in Mexico and I joke that we all come here to meet life lessons we cannot seem to learn back home in our comfortable cocoons. I joke but there’s truth in the fact we sometimes need our equilibrium unraveled, our ordered lives upended, in order to confront something we’ve been avoiding. Like we find ways to avoid, rather than learn, how to really get along with the old codger/old crone with whom we’ve cohabited for fifty-some years. We can give all the advice we like to our squabbling grand kids, but how do the two of us fare when confined to one room – for four months.


Looking back, what lessons have I learned, or recognized that I need to learn? The latter perhaps a lesson in itself…










We walked this morning along a malecön in a state of reconstruction AKA bedlam and traffic mayhem, laced with a level of garbage promiscuity that sent both our dogs into orgies of sniffing. Cappuccino, our geriatric Cairn, is slow at the best of times, but so lured was she by the prolific enticements so freely available, a snail would have coasted to the finish ahead of us. Patience. Our patience has grown in 2017.


There was ample time during this dawdling ambulation, to ponder the nature of our conversation and how it has subtly changed over the last year or so. It lacks the familiar tension that impatience once brought, but there is an addition. It is as if alter-egos with our worst habits and behaviors had taken to skipping through our conversations like goons, making faces and having fun with any residual earnestness.


This humorous lightness was present earlier in the morning, when I noticed the freezer door had been ajar all night, its contents sweating benignly in the warmth of a tropical winter. That once would have brought a meltdown of another kind, but not at the demise of 2017. And the joyful celebrations Mexicans do so noisily in the courtyard of our winter home, no longer sends a pajama-clad banshee raging from our door.


We laugh about those selves that had to come to Mexico to learn the lesson to lighten up. Launching into rant-mode can be the default, but this can be reconfigured. Life-long learning. One year at a time. If I have a resolution for 2018 it is to look backwards at achievements, and forwards, realizing there’s a jagged peak up ahead I didn’t see from lower down. I can just make out where I need to set my steps. I'll tell you how I’ve done on my journey, this time next year.Inshallah.