Tonight I'll be on that hill

Does it ever feel like a new year? Until this year I would’ve said that it doesn’t, that we can decide to change course at any time, that any day is as good a day as any to take stock, to make a list of what to keep and what to let go of. But then on December 31st, 2021, I was on the G on the way to my friend Eva’s house to celebrate New Year’s Eve with her and her boyfriend P, and it hit me — the year was about to end. I had spent the preceding twelve months feeling like I was swimming in one of those workout pools, the kind that are about as long as one-and-a-half human bodies and have a jet that points a stream of water toward your head so you can swim forever, at once tightly constrained and infinitely moving, and suddenly someone was about to turn off the stream. What would I do? 

I’ve never been big on New Year’s as a holiday; I found the pressure to go out on the day and have a good time stifling and artificial. I thought New Year’s resolutions were also stifling and artificial, and additionally Puritanical and superficial. I tend to be a bit of a grump about the December holidays in general. I grew up with summer Christmases full of dozens of people — cousins, aunts, uncles, friends, friends of friends, grandparents, grand-aunts and uncles, neighbors — and fireworks, trays of nuts and dried fruits, grilled meats, baskets of bread, enormous bowls of fruit salad sometimes spiked with 7Up, wine and champagne even for the kids (just wet your lips, they’d tell us as we took full, sickening sips), Marlboro Reds between the tips of the fingers of almost every adult. We’d sit outside, on white-plastic chairs around white-plastic tables patchwork-covered with tablecloths; if we were lucky we’d go on the roof to watch rings and spirals and willows and chrysanthemums light up and then cloud the sky; if we were really lucky we’d be at a house with a pool; if we were really really lucky we go to light a few exploding things off ourselves. When my family moved to the U.S. suddenly Christmas was just the five of us, in winter, in our dining room. The holiday shrank, and without all those other people to help uphold them, the traditions felt less important. (My parents did not agree. The presents that first year spread in every direction outward from under the tree.)

I developed a casual attitude toward the December holidays, caring little about where I spent them or with whom, just that I had some time off work to spend being more generous toward people I love. But here I was on the train suddenly feeling like if I didn’t do something to really pin down that the year was over, I would lose  the chance to get out of that infinity workout pool, to catch my breath for even one second.

I got to Eva’s and said something like, “I think if I actually take the time to reflect on everything that’s happened this year I’ll have a nervous breakdown,” to which she replied, “well, you’re in the right place!” We each named our year's highlights and lowlights (in categories: personal growth, art/work, miscellaneous). We made vision boards. We ate pizza and chocolate pie and found a video stream of Times Square, and I left at 12:15 because I was worried about my dog being home alone amid the fireworks. 

The next day, it was like a bug had bitten me: I wanted to make lists. I wanted to plan my life. I wanted to think about how to act. Topics for lists started materializing: things I want to do every day, things I want to do every week, things I want to do more of in general, people in New York to spend time with, people not in New York to think about and call on the phone. Five things to let go of, five intentions. The lists almost populated themselves; I didn’t have to think about it. Suddenly I was vibrating. I put on Springsteen. 

I put on Springsteen because it’s what I want to listen to when I want to jolt myself awake. The guy’s relentless; live performances used to make me wonder how he just kept going like that. Now I don’t wonder; I think I know: bodies in motion tend to stay that way. And even though every time I didn’t make a New Year’s resolution it was because I thought that I was already in motion, that I just needed to keep going, I realize now that I was giving up a chance to move a little more powerfully, more deliberately, more in the direction I want to go in. 

“Tonight I’ll be on that hill ‘cause I can’t stop,” Bruce sings on “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” It’s the first line of the last verse, and he delivers it with such conviction you’d think there was some prize waiting for him there — but no. Later lines reveal that he’ll be there to “pay the cost for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town.” 

We keep going. There’s neither recompense nor punishment at the summit — just life.