A Good Year

 

It was a good year.

 

A good year for making friends.  A good year for chocolates and choir.  A good year for hiking in spring, summer, and fall.  

January, February, March, and April were the slowest months of the year and even so we fit in so much. I went on my first 5k in Chenango Valley State Park, friends invited us to a sledding party (with way too many donuts!), and we hiked Slide Mountain. Sundays we went to choir. For Easter, Evan and I made our first batch of chocolates. We had fun celebrating Tadgh’s birthday, walking in the woods with friends for Cadie’s, and I finished my first photobook project for Mom’s. We nearly killed Curtis hiking to a fire tower that was missing it’s bottom set of stairs. These cold, indoor months are also when our circle of online friends and Discord servers expanded, introducing us to many of the friends we’d spend the rest of the year with.

Some happy times are just that — happy. Others have a thread of purple sorrow woven into the fabric of happiness.  The happy times that, inside, you know are only borrowed by self-deceit. They are not truly yours to keep. The thread of sadness is because you can see that the coming sorrow of losing what was never yours is going to outweigh the joy you had while you pretended. 

You feel it coming. You smile because it’s a happy time in a good year; but inside you feel it there — what isn’t there. The empty thing that isn’t being filled up, what won’t last,  turning your insides cold even while your outsides are being warmed by sunlight, friends, and your own smile.

It was a good year.

A good year for kayaking. A good year for obstacle courses and 5ks. A good year for getting first-row seats for sunsets and fireworks from the top of a fire tower.  

In May, June, July, and August things exploded. We kicked off the end of April’s quarantine with a finger-lakes trail hike for Deirdre’s birthday. We hiked Snowy mountain. We wandered into Balsam Lake Mountain Wild Forest and climbed it’s fire tower. We celebrated Pippen’s birthday with creek-wading and viewing our old home from a new angle. We hiked Labrador Hollow for my birthday. We made chocolates again, twice, once for Debbie’s birthday and once for several people at a graduation/birthday party. 

Sometimes that thread of sorrow grows as the joy grows. August was the climax, the apotheosis, the crescendo. Joy and happiness, mingling together like an artist who doesn’t know how to mix his paints but still makes masterful strokes, creating something beautiful and ugly. 

Hiking in that perfect summer weather surrounded by wonderful views and wonderful smiles, friends and family.  Through no credit of mine, everything is going perfectly, the things only God can control conspiring to give us a most blessed day, reminding me of how small my role is in all of this. It’s a good hike.

But slowly I’m hearing that distracting, distant noise. 

Good friends can enjoy each-others company in any ordinary slice of woods on a sunny summer day, but this was no ordinary place, and some delightful surprise was around every corner: a hole in the ground leading to a little tunnel, a rock scramble, a cliff to climb. Some days are like storybooks, unfolding in a sequence of never-dull moments. Combine it with the company of good friends and it’s hard not to smile, to laugh.  But behind those laughter-painted eyes that cold feeling is gripping me. I’m hearing that distracting noise, the roar of a distant ocean wave, getting louder, louder, coming to break upon these mountains.

And when that wave hits you, it knocks you flat.

August. The crescendo. Surrounded by more friends than ever before, but feeling more alone than ever before. Despite the physical closeness, you grow increasingly aware of only the distance between each other, the lack of knowing, the insufficiencies,  what’s missing in the spiritual heart of it — and why?

Where were these people when I was younger?

Why didn’t we hike then, back when happy memories were recycled by the imagination in next day’s play, rather than carried away by high tide when you return to work on Monday?

It was a good year.

A good year for resin projects, writing letters, and fall colors. A good year for blackberry picking and babies, swimming and sledding. 

September, October, November, December. Another year disappears with an applause and encore. We topped ourselves again with chocolates. We hiked, ran, and played. I expected to be more nervous on stage; but maybe the practice memorizing the lines paid off. It actually became easier for me when I started to act the lines and use my funny old-man voice to play Balthazar, delivering the good news about Christ Jesus. Taking on the role of an old man felt very natural to me for some reason. 

An abundance of new friendships does not eliminate loneliness. There is not a direct one-to-one correlation. Sometimes loneliness is not caused not by the number of friendships, but by the depth, and new friendships are inherently shallower. But depth is not itself a cure to loneliness, either, if your loneliness even is curable. A relationship with a child or a parent, no matter how deep it is, is not the same as a relationship with a peer.

Loneliness caused by the absence of one kind of relationship cannot be filled by the presence of another.

In some ways, though, the more surface level friendships you have the more it draws attention to the relationships you don’t have. Making your loneliness, ironically, worse with more friends. It makes you realize how little the friends you have know you, and how little you know them. The truths not shared, the tears not seen, the screams not heard.

It is no fault of theirs, nor your own, that the type of relationship you have with them is not the type that has room for the type of knowing and being known that you need.

It was a good year.

A good year for trying new things, for giving gifts. A good year for birthday parties and graduations. A good year for baptisms and broken hearts.

My baptism seemed like such a small thing, but it is symbolic of a much greater truth, a truly miraculous saving grace. For years – all my adolescence – I was caught in a loop, a spiral downwards, that I despaired of ever escaping.

This year, I escaped.

We lie to ourselves, telling ourselves we need just one more thing. Then we get that thing and come up with a new lie about what would make us happy. We would be happy if only we had real friendships. We’d be happy if we weren’t lonely anymore. We feel the hunger and thirst and we try to figure out why. 

Really, though, we’re just hungering and thirsting for the new creation.

A year we won’t forget — or will we? Almost 10 years ago we moved,  leaving behind the place I had always called home, wondering when I would wake up and find this new place was home. Now the old house has my brother and his wife and their three kids living in it, and as we help them get a Christmas tree, it feels like only a moment ago that me and Evan were catering their wedding with a fleet of borrowed crock pots hoping we weren’t about to give a couple hundred people food poisoning.

 

I remember that, but I don’t remember anything else about that year.

 

But how could I forget this year?

Is this just a season of my life?  Or is this how it’ll always be?  “Rejoice always” — God knows I’m trying.

It was such a good year,

 

the best year,

 

So why wasn’t I happy?

 

“Though we’re strangers, still I love you
I love you more than your mask

And you know you have to trust this to be true
And I know that’s much to ask

But lay down your fears

Come and join this feast
He has called us here
You and me

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
On these souls, this drought has dried

In His Blood and in His Body
In this Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

 

And though I love you, still we’re strangers
Prisoners in these lonely hearts
And though our blindness separates us
Still His light shines in the dark

And His outstretched arms
Are still strong enough to reach
Behind these prison bars
To set us free

 

So may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls, the drought has dried

In His Blood and in His Body
In this Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you

And may peace rain down from Heaven
Like little pieces of the sky
Like those little keepers of the promise
Falling on these souls, the draught has dried

In His Blood and in His Body
In this Bread and in this Wine
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you
Peace to you
Peace of Christ to you”

 

(Peace – Rich Mullins)