Brave New Year

Last year left us jittery and suspicious. So when my husband saw the New Year’s cards I’d bought—with Rilke’s “And now let us welcome the new year, full of thing that have never been” on the front—he pointed at the final words and said, “Really? ‘Things that have never been’? How about ‘things we had and liked before’ instead?” 

One thing I’m suspicious about is New Year’s resolutions.  

Maybe they work for people who rule their lives with an iron will. For better or worse, I’m not one of those people. I can get plenty of things done, but I have to coax myself into doing them. I use lures and bribes and soft words, as though my brain were a skittish horse being loaded into a trailer. By hard experience, I’ve learned that, if I shake my fist at the universe and proclaim, “Come hell or high water, I WILL DO this,” I will soon get annoyed at the tyranny of my own superego and then rebel against it. (I realize it’s strange. But I’ve concluded that most human beings, examined closely, are strange.) What works better for me is to quietly set an intention. All I’m doing—or so I tell myself—is orienting myself in the direction I want to travel for a bit. I’m just consulting the map and packing a few supplies for the road. No need to get agitated. No big deal.

Does it work? Sometimes. Better than other things.

I have all sorts of intentions for 2021—exactly the same ones I had last year and the year before that. Being loving to my friends and family, for one. Also, being a generally decent person (or, as I like to put it, “not being an asshole”). Also, staying reasonably healthy—which this year means avoiding Covid, if possible.

Those are the most important intentions. But also, because I’m a type who needs deadlines and doesn’t respond well to drift, I also intend to work on a couple of projects.

Lots of people—probably most people—don’t need or want structured projects, especially in retirement. Some are running experiments to see what desires and interests will naturally rise up inside them. Others can happily let the pleasures and responsibilities of ordinary life set the agenda for their days. Sometimes I can do those things, but mostly I need schedules and structure. So here are my two projects for the year.

Project #1

For one thing, I’ll be teaching a class this spring through my local Learning in Retirement group. For years, I’ve cherished the prospect of teaching adults once I retired. (No finals! No papers! Only students who want to be there!) Twenty years ago, an unexpected trial run at teaching grownups solidified this dream. Since I was adjuncting in those days, I’d signed on to teach a class on Women’s Literature at Hartford Technical Community College. A week before the class started, the dean called. “Just to prepare you,” she said, “there are a lot of seniors signed up for the class.” My mouth automatically said, “Great!” Meanwhile my brain wondered, Graduating seniors should be the very best students, shouldn’t they? Why is she warning me about them? In my first class, I discovered that she hadn’t meant graduating seniors; she’d meant white-haired seniors. And by the third class, I’d discovered that I loved teaching them. Those twenty women were eager, enthusiastic students. They read carefully and thoughtfully. They brought life-experience to the discussion. What was not to love about that?

So, a year ago, when I came home from six months of post-retirement travel, I started looking around for intellectual stimulation. (My book club is fabulous, but it meets once a month. Not enough.) A staff-member at the library ran a serious reading-group. And with permission from the professors, I could audit high-level classes at the local colleges. To audit, however, I’d have to attend classes all semester (which meant no travel in the spring or fall—and freedom to travel was part of the point of retirement for me). Worse, neither of those possibilities would lead naturally to a chance to teach. Next I investigated OLLI (the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, a national program), but the closest classes turned out to be nearly two hours’ drive away. In my town, the Senior Center offered adult classes. Then I heard about Learning in Retirement (which, like OLLI, is attached to colleges and universities all over the country). When I found LIR, I sank into it like Goldilocks settling into the chair that felt just right.

After taking a couple of vibrant classes through LIR, I now feel ready to lead one. So this spring I’ll be moderating a class on three postmodern novels: The English Patient, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Lincoln in the Bardo. They’re the kind of books I like to teach—dense and “chewy” (so there’s lots to mull over in class discussions) but also deeply pleasurable to read. Running the Zoom side of it will be challenging, but I expect the class to be a blast.

Project #2

I also intend to self-publish a novel. (I know. Me and everybody else in the world. But there it is.) I’ve written two novels and half-finished a third. It’s time to push one of them out of the nest and into the world.

Am I nervous about it? You bet. I love reading and teaching serious, demanding books, but when I let my imagination play, things can get very silly. In my off-hours, I enjoy reading well-written genre fiction, and that’s also what I write for pleasure. By publishing, I will be exposing my soft, silly underbelly to the world. 

Since what I’ve produced is small-market fiction, I’ll need to self-publish. Which means I have to learn how to self-publish. (Every time I write or say that, I feel slightly faint.) There’s a steep learning curve and lots of people who want to publish, so I’ll be chronicling the less technical aspects of the process in a monthly blog post. Because my fiction is bubbly and slightly sweet, I’m going to call this series of posts “Prose and Prosecco.”

There’s one final project I don’t have to put on the list: travel planning. I turn to that as naturally as breathing. I’m antsy to see family again and to return to Europe; I’m even antsy to start finding plane flights and places to stay. What are your hopes, plans, and intentions for this Brave New Year?

(PS. The cards, called “Juncos,” are from Saturn Press in Maine.)